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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The dead camel was lying in a minefield surrounded by barbed wire. From forty or fifty yards away, which was the closest I could get, it looked like a pile of dirty rags in the desert, but when the wind blew in my direction the odor was unmistakable. A few days earlier, the camel had stepped on one of the many land mines that Saddam Hussein's Army bequeathed to the Rumaila oil fields, which extend south from Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, to the Kuwait border. Alive, the camel had been worth somewhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars, a vast sum to its impoverished Bedouin owner, who was one of the few Iraqis living on this arid and inhospitable plain. Now its rotting corpse was just another problem for the American cleanup crews who are working in the area--a malodorous reminder of the many unexpected difficulties that have plagued the Pentagon's effort to get the Iraqi oil industry up and running.
One of the Americans, Elliott Adler, a stocky fellow with the weather-beaten look of somebody who spends his life outdoors, walked me around the periphery of the minefield, which was just down the road from an oil-processing facility. Adler is an ordnance-removal expert who works for EOD Technology, a firm based in Knoxville, Tennessee, which the Pentagon hired to help clean up the Iraqi oil fields. He said nobody had figured out a safe way to remove the camel, which was why it was still lying in the sand, attracting flies. Like most of the Americans I met in Rumaila, Adler arrived in Iraq at the end of the war, hoping to get the country's oil flowing. Back in March, the Pentagon awarded a controversial no-bid contract to repair the oil fields to Kellogg Brown & Root, a Houston-based engineering firm, which, in turn, hired a number of subcontractors so that it could start work as soon as the fighting ended. KBR, as the company refers to itself, is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil-services company formerly run by Vice-President Dick Cheney. The day Baghdad fell, on April 9th, Cheney predicted that by the end of the year Iraq's oil output could reach three million barrels a day, slightly more than its prewar level.
The American crews had begun by extinguishing oil fires set by the retreating Iraqis. By the end of April, nearly all the fires had been put out, raising hopes for a rapid return to normal production. But by the time I reached Rumaila, in early May, the optimism had faded. Amid widespread disorder, Iraq was producing only about a tenth as much oil as it had been before the war, many of its citizens were being forced to line up for gasoline and heating fuel, and the Ministry of Oil had announced emergency plans to import fuel from Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey. The task of clearing the oil fields of unexploded munitions hadn't received as much publicity as the gasoline shortage and the looting, but to the Americans on the ground it was a major concern. "At this point, I don't have any clear understanding of how long this cleanup operation is going to take," Adler said.
The South Rumaila and North Rumaila fields are what people in the oil world refer to as "elephants" or "supergiants." Before the war, they generated more than a million barrels of crude oil a day. Because of the Rumaila region's strategic importance, it was heavily fortified by Saddam, and it saw fighting in all three of his wars: the Iran-Iraq War of the nineteen-eighties, the Gulf War in 1991, and this year's invasion. The narrow roads through the oil fields were lined with incinerated armor, hunks of rusting metal, and bombed-out barracks buildings. As we drove along, Adler stopped and showed me some abandoned Iraqi trenches, which contained discarded uniforms and empty food cans. A few yards away, there was a firing position, with a working rocket launcher and about a dozen Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades.
The fleeing Iraqi soldiers weren't the only ones who had left behind ordnance. After passing an old drilling rig, we came to a working well, a corroded piece of metal sticking about ten feet out of the ground, which four Americans were checking for explosives. "Over there, we found incoming rounds--155-mm. howitzers--bomblets, and 122-mm. mortars," Richard Weaver, a slight man with glasses and a ponytail, said. "The incoming rounds were ours, and the bomblets were ours. The one-twenty-two mortars were Russian." Weaver and his colleagues were military veterans working for a firm called USA Environmental, which is based in Tampa, Florida. They demonstrated their bomb-detecting technique, walking off slowly, four abreast, eyes scanning the ground ahead for signs of danger. The biggest threats, Weaver said, were buried Iraqi mines and unexploded American bomblets--M-42 submunitions that resemble small aerosol cans with a ribbon attached to one end. The American and British forces dispersed tens of thousands of these deadly weapons, which are packed inside large artillery shells. They are supposed to go off on landing, piercing any armor or flesh that gets in their way, but occasionally they don't. Weaver, however, seemed more worried about the mines, which even experts can fail to detect.
A couple of miles farther on, I got my first glimpse of Iraqi oil, at the site of a burst pipeline, which had created a shallow black lake about two hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide. This area, too, was covered with unexploded bomblets--about three hundred of them, according to an American soldier who was guarding it. "The ordnance slows us up," Ben Benson, a civil engineer with a firm called the O'Brien's Group, in New Orleans, said. "You can't rush it. There are explosives out here that are almost impossible to detect." Nonetheless, the contractors had started to drain the lake by pumping the thick crude into tanker trucks and taking it away. It wasn't the most efficient method, but at least some Rumaila crude was making it out of the oil fields.
With the exception of its southern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, Iraq has more oil buried underneath it than any country in the world: a hundred and twelve billion barrels in confirmed reserves, plus an undetermined amount that has yet to be discovered. The Rumaila fields are Iraq's biggest. They contain more than six hundred wells, which produce three streams of crude: Basra Regular, Basra Medium, and Basra Heavy. The oil is trapped at such high pressure that when a well is drilled it gushes out by itself, so there is no need for the "nodding donkeys" that are used to pump oil in Texas and Oklahoma. Along with cheap labor, this accident of nature helps to explain why Iraq has the cheapest production costs in the world, at about a dollar a barrel. (In Texas these days, oil costs about six dollars a barrel to produce.)
Once the crude is extracted from the ground, it is sent by pipeline to a local processing facility known as a gosp (gas-oil separation plant), which skims off the natural gas. There are thirty-four gosps in the Rumaila fields, but only one of them, No. 3R, was operating. Dave Urbon, a friendly fifty-six-year-old electrical engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' hydraulics-and-hydrology branch, was overseeing the plant. The Corps of Engineers, which dates back to the Revolutionary War, is leading Task Force Rio ("Restore Iraqi Oil"), the military-civilian effort to repair the Iraqi oil fields. Urbon volunteered to go to Iraq because, he said, he "wanted to have an adventure and help out." When he arrived at gosp 3R on April 4th, it was shut down, and there were no Iraqis to be found. Looters had sacked the offices and storerooms, and there was no electricity or working telephones. Fortunately, the oil-processing equipment was largely intact, and it hadn't been booby-trapped. Along with a couple of engineers from KBR, Urbon did some electrical repairs and got the emergency generators working. After several weeks, and many delays, the plant had started processing crude. Several dozen Iraqis had returned to work, and Urbon said they were highly able technicians.
He took me on a tour, starting at the heads, where the oil comes in from the wells. There were thirty metal pipes, but only four of them were switched on. "The wells are eleven thousand feet deep," Urbon said. "They turn them on, and up it comes." The gosp's equipment looked old and rickety, but it was functioning. Urbon said it dated from the nineteen-seventies, which is the last time the Iraqi government invested heavily in the oil industry. From the heads, the oil was being forced through a series of pipes and tanks, which reduced its pressure and siphoned off the natural gas. A turbine with a plaque on its side that said "Mather & Platt, Manchester" was powering the machinery; a meter showed that it was pumping sixty-nine thousand barrels a day--about a quarter of the gosp's full capacity. Urbon said that he was hoping to turn on another turbine in the next few days and raise the output to a hundred thousand barrels. "They have one well that can produce thirty thousand barrels a day,"...
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