BAIJI, Iraq, 6 July 2003 — Rampant looting is preventing Iraq’s biggest oil refinery at Baiji from cranking out full supplies, with output running at only 70 percent of pre-war levels, a senior Iraqi oil official said.
Riad Ghassab, director general of the Northern Oil Refining Co., told Reuters yesterday that pillaging of the facility’s power lines is forcing the huge complex to shut down occasionally or pump below its 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity.
“Our production before the war was 250,000 bpd. Now it is 70 percent of that level,” he said of the facility which supplies the Iraqi capital and the northern city of Mosul.
Looters are also playing havoc with the refinery’s ability to route urgently needed products such as gasoline and diesel fuel to those key cities, he said.
“They are shooting holes in these pipelines,” he said. “It is a big problem.”
And one which is forcing Iraq to import products such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and gasoline. “Iraq is importing a lot,” said Ghassab, without elaborating.
Saboteurs attacked and damaged the main pipeline carrying crude oil to the refinery at Baiji, 250 kilometers (90 miles) north of Baghdad, at the end of last month.
Ghassab said the refinery is still receiving full volumes of crude through the pipeline, but he was uncertain about the state of repairs.
Iraq’s sprawling oil pipeline network has been hit by a spate of attacks which have hampered the country’s efforts to restore exports needed to fund post-war reconstruction.
US military and Iraqi officials in the town of Baiji said Saddam Hussein loyalists are still bent on sabotaging pipelines.
But Iraq’s main oil refinery is not just fighting off vandals. It is suffering from years of neglect under United Nations sanctions.
Some of the units in the complex have not been overhauled for four years, Ghassab said.
The Oil Ministry is now working on a maintenance plan which could close down operations for about one month. But the Baiji refinery chief said a schedule for repairs had yet to be set.
Meanwhile, a fresh tender by Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization for 8 million barrels of Basra Light crude oil to load in the second half of July points toward sputtering supply and a shortfall in export targets set by the US-led administration.
An Oil Ministry source said Friday that the tender, which closes July 7, is in four 2-million barrel lots. It loads July 10-31 at Mina Al-Bakr and equates to 380,000 barrels a day of Basra crude output. That is around a quarter of what the southern oil fields were producing before the war.
The spot tender raises questions about whether Iraq will be able to meet its targets to export some 1 million bpd in July. The country’s oil facilities and pipeline network continue to be plagued by looting and sabotage and production has been stuck under 1 million bpd, of which 500,000 bpd is for domestic use.