Oil found in Anbar province where Sunnis live

NY Times:

In a remote patch of the Anbar desert just 20 miles from the Syrian border, a single blue pillar of flanges and valves sits atop an enormous deposit of oil and natural gas that would be routine in this petroleum-rich country except for one fact: this is Sunni territory.

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.

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The new studies have increased estimates of the amount of oil in a series of deposits in Sunni territory to the north and east of Baghdad and in a series of deposits that run through western Iraq like beads on a string, and could contain as much as a trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The revised figures, though large, would not mean that deposits in Sunni territories could challenge the giant fields elsewhere in the country.

And while it would take years actually to begin pulling gas and oil out of the fields even if the area soon became safe enough for companies to work in, energy corporations have been excited about the area’s potential, even if it falls short of reserves in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.

The analysis, still little known outside a small circle of specialists, is important enough that on Friday, Brig. Gen. John R. Allen of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, who is deputy commanding general of Multi-National Force-West, which has responsibility for Anbar Province, made the long trip into the desert to visit the blue wellhead. General Allen’s duties include promoting the economic development of the province.

The deposit beneath is the Akkas field, one of the beads on the string that runs from Ninewa Province in the north to the border with Saudi Arabia in the south.

“It’s phenomenal standing here,” General Allen said. “What this does is it gives Anbar and the Sunnis an economic future different from phosphate and cement,” he said, referring to products of some of the aging factories in the area.

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I am sure this will speed the Democrats call for retreat from Iraq, since they sure don't want to spill any blood for oil. This is an important discovery that could ease tensions in Iraq and at the same time worsen Iran's position since it would increase the supply of oil during a time of falling prices. This is a photo of the gas well stem. I wonder if the Saudis permit oil valves and flanges that look like a cross.