Senor Barborito wrote:



The US Department of Energy lists that OPEC accounts for 39.24% of the world's oil supply here. I got this number by taking the millions of barrels oil supply from OPEC (30.1 millions of barrels per day) and dividing by the world total supply (76.7 millions of barrels per day).

Now, as far as oil *EXPORTS* go, OPEC.org, if you take the export numbers for 2001 for each member nation and add them together, claims 19.8808 millions of barrels per day. You'll note that 'other non-EUCD' is listed in the DOE chart as consuming 11.2 millions of barrels per day. Simple math tells us that OPEC nations then consume roughly 10.3 millions of barrels per day which makes a lot of sense considering that the remaining .9 millions of bpd are left to nations not in the OECD, nor OPEC, nor all of Asia including the former Soviet nations and China, nor all of Europe. In short .9 is what the bulk of the extremely 3rd world nations in Africa and South America consume.

Of the 19.8808 millions of barrels per day exported by OPEC, Iraq represents 1.7102 millions of bpd or 8.6% of OPEC's current output, which when multiplied by 39.24% equates to 3.4% of the world's oil supply.

In short Iraq is already at the statistic the US Department of State infers they might be at after another seven years if everything goes flawlessly here. Which is to say that if the war goes flawlessly and the dust has settled by May-June, every increase in production beyond current levels makes a liar out of the DoS.

Not exactly the strongest argument, but maybe we should look a little closer - what about future supply? What does the US potentially gain here?

If we add all the numbers for proven crude reserves on OPECs site we find that Iraq has 112.5 of the 846.01 billion barrels in OPEC's reserves. When you divide this out, you see that Iraq has 13.3% of OPECs reserves. Now that looks very interesting compared to the 8.6% export, doesn't it? That looks like a good amount of unexploited oil. If one were to take OPEC, subtract Iraq from it completely, and work out a billions of barrels per day (0.018706) to proven billions of barrels total remaining (733.509) ratio (which I'll call 'efficiency' short for 'efficiency of exploitation'), it would come out as 0.000025502073. Iraq's personal 'efficiency' ratio works out to 0.0017102/112.5 or 0.0000152017(77777 repeating).

0.000015201777 divided by 0.000025502073 = 59.63% 'efficiency' when compared to the rest of OPEC. In case you're wondering why I didn't just divide 8.6% current output by 13.3% reserve (64.66%) - those numbers would have included Iraq's own 'efficiency.'

So Iraq is only operating at roughly 59.63% efficiency relative to the rest of OPEC. At baseline 100% efficiency it would be exporting (1.7102 millions of bpd * 100) / 59.3 = 2.88398 millions of barrels per day. A total increase of 1.17378 millions of barrels per day, OR in terms of current market value ($33.51/barrel), $39,333,367.8 a day, or $14.36 *billion* a year in oil added to the global market. This only when simply meeting the *average* of OPEC, to say nothing of exceeding it.

The US clearly won't see all of that money, but control of the country will provide current administration-friendly US oil companies significant leverage in forging 'special deals' with Iraqi production facilities (if not outright takeover), especially any potential new ones. So it is likely that in the event of a war, the bulk of that money would be hitting the US economy (or perhaps simply the oil itself?) first, and to be quite frank it will probably be hitting the coffers of oil companies in which the current administration has significant vested interests. It should also be noted that the introduction of US technology can only serve to increase Iraqi 'efficiency' for obvious reasons.

There's your war booty.

--SB