Sunni Oil

This is good news:

Huge petroleum deposits have long been known in Iraq’s Kurdish north and Shiite south. But now, Iraq has substantially increased its estimates of the amount of oil and natural gas in deposits on Sunni lands after quietly paying foreign oil companies tens of millions of dollars over the past two years to re-examine old seismic data across the country and retrain Iraqi petroleum engineers.The development is likely to have significant political effects: the lack of natural resources in the central and western regions where Sunnis hold sway has fed their disenchantment with the nation they once ruled. And it has driven their insistence on a strong central government, one that would collect oil revenues and spread them equitably among the country’s factions, rather than any division of the country along sectarian regional boundaries.

[...]

In the past, some Western oil experts have speculated that as much as 100 billion barrels of additional crude oil could be found in deep formations in Anbar, but investigating those structures would probably require new seismic testing with equipment on the ground, a difficult task given the dangers of working in Iraq at the moment.

Akkas is expected to be among a small number of fields to be given priority in Iraq’s development plan once the oil law is passed.

Although Mr. Bayati was initially reluctant to discuss the political implications of oil and gas reserves in Sunni territory, he eventually conceded that the impact was likely to spread beyond the arcane world of oil engineering. “Eventually one has to deal with reality on the ground,” he said.

[...]

the novelty of oil resources on Sunni territory has certainly caught the fancy of those the finds could affect the most. Farhan T. Farhan, the mayor of Qaim, which is the nearest populated area to Akkas, said in an interview that he already had his eye on the possible economic benefits of developing the field.

“If we use this petroleum,” he said, “it will be enough for all the west of Iraq.”

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