Nawar Alsaadi (Iraqi expat oil expert): Iraq's oil ministry has a goal of producing 6 million barrels/day of oil over the medium term. However, six years after the fall of Baghdad, the country is nowhere close to producing 6 million barrels a day. As a matter of fact, the country is still not producing at the same level it did before the war (2.2m bpd vs 2.5m bpd before the war). It is worth noting that the pre-war level was achieved despite years of war and crippling economic sanctions. Yet despite current access to capital and technology, the country could not yield better results than oil production under the Saddam regime in the midst of war and sanctions.Now they're worrying production will go under 2 million barrels per day, "What is more worrisome after several years of miss-management is that Iraqi oil production is on the verge of witnessing a sharp decline in production to possibly under 2 million barrels a day, as indicated from recent news reports."
Of course, this story is not new. The Houston Chronicle carried THIS story in February 2004: "Ex-oil minister warns Iraq fields being ruined." I'd blogged it at the time. It really says a lot that the Cheney-led U.S.-invasion-sponsored oil program and its local quislings have screwed things up even more than what happened under Saddam.
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