On another site I read that Iraq was not able to meet the "quota" set up for it for oil exports already...will look again for the news item. This seems pretty official on the state of one country's oil patch. Please excuse the formatting in advance if it does not work. ******************************

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 (AFP) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has warned of a possible "major breakdown" of the Iraqi oil industry if the Security Council continues to withhold spare parts and equipment. In a letter to the council president, US ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Annan said Iraq's oil industry was "in a lamentable state" requiring "prompt remedial action." The letter was dated January 14 and made public on Tuesday. Annan repeated a previous recommendation that the council increase from 300 million dollars to 600 million dollars the amount Iraq could spend on rehabilitating its industry in the six-month phase of the oil-for-food programme which ended on December 9. He said he would await the report of a group of six UN experts who arrived in Iraq on Monday before deciding whether or not to recommend a similar increase of the allocation under the current six-month phase. The experts -- two from Britain, and one each from the Netherlands, Jordan, Norway and Russia -- are due to stay in Iraq until January 31, Annan said in a separate note. The Security Council removed the ceiling on Iraq's exports of crude oil when it revised its nine-year-old sanctions regime on December 17. But restrictions remain on the use which Iraq may make of its oil revenues, and all contracts for imports must be approved by the council's sanctions committee. On Wednesday the United Nations said that Iraq had submitted a total of 2,003 contracts worth 1.11 billion dollars for oil parts and equipment under the three most recent complete phases of the oil-for-food programme. The sanctions committee had approved 907 of these, worth 453.3 million dollars, and put another 448, worth 224.6 million dollars, on hold, the Office of the Iraq Programme said. The other contracts are either pending the committee's decision or have not yet been processed due to insufficient information provided by Iraq. In his letter, Annan said the deterioration of Iraq's oil facilities was affecting the health of workers and causing serious environmental damage as well as damaging oil wells, some of them permanently. If it continued, he said, it "may also cause a major breakdown in Iraq's oil production and export capacity." Annan appended to his letter a detailed list of spare parts and equipment drawn up by an independent expert who visited Iraq under contract from the UN from December 15 to 21. The expert, from the Dutch firm Saybolt, quoted the ministry of oil in Baghdad as saying that Iraq had averaged production of 2.75 million barrels a day in the six months to December 9. Of this, it exported 2.16 million barrels per day. The expert quoted the ministry as saying this level of output had been achieved "under a regime of severe risk management" rather than a "planned programme of good reservoir management." He forecast output of between 2.5 million and 2.6 million bpd in the current six-month phase of the oil-for-food programme, with exports of between 1.95 million and 2.0 million bpd. In his letter Annan said that "unless applications for contracts for key items of oil spare parts and equipment are approved expeditiously and are made available and commissioned within a short time frame, the production of oil is likely to drop, even under a regime of 'severe risk management'."

Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)

-- Laurane (familyties@rttinc.com), January 20, 2000

Answers

Do you like to mudwrestle?

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 20, 2000.

I kept telling myself - "Self, it's not you"..."he just doesn't realise you exist" - "I don't know how to make him notice me" and NOW he asks if I like to mudwrestle....oh joy!!!

I've only been here since May/98 and I am so underwhelmed that you would ask. I sure hope there's mud where you are 'cause there's 6 inches of snow here....BTW do you like to snowball.....fight.

-- Laurane (familyties@rttinc.com), January 20, 2000.

Laurane- Great post!! the way we treat the Iraqi people is a shame. and it is the people that our government hurts.

-- Juan Valdez (vgd38@hotmail.com), January 20, 2000.

"under a regime of severe risk management" = running manually???

Maybe the spare parts in need are Y2K compliant embedded control systems.

-- Bill P (porterwn@one.net), January 20, 2000.

I suspect that they need absolutely everything...and are cannibilizing some facilities to keep others in operation.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), January 20, 2000.