The Kurdish oil boom similarities to Puntland

[Burn Notice]

THE KURDISH OIL BOOM AND SIMILARITIES TO PUNTLAND

by DISSIDENT NATION on JUNE 28, 2012 in RESOURCES with NO COMMENTS

 

The village of Shela, a collection of mud and stone huts, sprouts from the denuded landscape of Kurdistan like a clump of dun-coloured mushrooms. It is an eerily quiet place, its sole dirt track deserted, as if everyone has scurried inside and barred the doors before a Wild West shoot-out. There are cowboys about, but not the kind you are thinking of. Just over the hill, a pair of bright-orange gas flares bleed trails of acrid black smoke into a brilliant blue sky.

 

 

Oil — lots of it — has been found in this corner of northern Iraq, an enclave of 5m people that is part of a shaky power-sharing coalition with Sunni and Shia Muslims. The discoveries may seem unremarkable. It is Iraq, after all. But Kurdistan, wedged uncomfortably between Turkey to the north, Iran and Syria to either side, and the rest of Iraq to the south, is different. For decades under Saddam Hussein, and before, the Kurds — ethnically and culturally different from their Arab countrymen — were brutalised, bombed and persecuted. The most notorious instance came in 1988, when Saddam gassed thousands of civilians in the village of Halabja, a massacre recognised by the Iraq High Court as an act of genocide. All of Iraq`s oil came from giant fields in the south and east. Kurdistan had to get by on herding goats, subsistence farming, and aid handouts from abroad.

 

The downfall in 2003 of Saddam`s regime after the US-led invasion changed everything. The Kurdish authorities, endowed with new powers thanks to the new constitution, saw their chance. They flung open the doors to foreign explorers. The results have been astounding. The first 10 wells drilled hit paydirt. The United States Geological Survey estimates that the region holds up to 45 billion barrels — nearly as much as has been produced by Britain since North Sea oil first started pumping out in the 1960s. News travelled fast.

 

Today, Kurdistan is in the grip of an old-fashioned oil boom. Planes flying into a gleaming new airport in Erbil, the capital, are full of foreign chatter: Texan drawl, Chinese staccato, the flat vowels of Yorkshire. They swap stories of gushers found and fortunes made.

 

Five-star hotels are rising from building-site lots that only recently were little more than disused scrubland. Electricity runs virtually 24 hours a day, when five years ago the city was lucky to squeeze out a few hours from its dilapidated network. Baghdad still only gets by on four hours of power a day. And it`s peaceful. No coalition troops were killed in Kurdistan in the eight-year occupation. The last suicide bombing occurred in a remote village in 2009.

 

Five years ago, Kurdistan produced 2,000 barrels a day from a single well. Today it churns out 250,000 barrels a day

 

“It feels like Dubai 25 years ago,” says Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive who left the company over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. He resurrected his career as the boss of Genel Energy. One of Kurdistan`s new oil pioneers, he floated the firm in London last year after merging it with a shell company he set up with Nat Rothschild, the billionaire scion of the banking dynasty. They have already awarded themselves shares worth more than £100m — and it`s just getting started.

 

Five years ago, Kurdistan produced 2,000 barrels a day from a single well. Today it churns out 250,000 barrels a day. With oil selling for over $120 a barrel, that equates to $900m a month in a country where average annual income barely tops $5,500. Hundreds of millionaires, and even a couple of billionaires, have already been made.

[Somalia]

If onshore Puntland contains a bare minimum of 2 billion BBL, Somalia is in good hands.

 

Erbil, Kurdistan.

 

[Timur]

Billionaires are being made in Kurdistan, along with places like Angola as well. My uncle told me when that first well in PL sprung up that Somalia's future billionaires were being cemented that day.

[GaraadMon]

Billionaires from what? I don't understand how anyone deserves to become rich off of Somali oil. I'd rather live as an average Iranian or Malaysian rather than a rich Qatari, you can't buy the feeling of knowing your country will still exist when your oil fields are depleted.

[Haatu]

Somalia is in good hands indeed. There's plenty more oil all over the north, the south and offshore as well as precious metals and stones. If only we can end the transition and quickly unite (administratively that is)

[Timur]

Blackflash;846366 wrote:

Billionaires from what? I don't understand how anyone deserves to become rich off of Somali oil. I'd rather live as an average Iranian or Malaysian rather than a rich Qatari, you can't buy the feeling of knowing your country will still exist when your oil fields are depleted.

Do you know what oil billionaire means? It means the people who provide logistics, catering, and other services. Are you saying that the first man in Bari to establish an oil trucking franchise doesn't deserve his wealth?

 

What do you mean you don't understand how anyone deserves to get rich off Somali oil? If Somalis shouldn't get rich off the oil, then who should?

[GaraadMon]

Timur;846420 wrote:

Do you know what oil billionaire means? It means the people who provide logistics, catering, and other services. Are you saying that the first man in Bari to establish an oil trucking franchise doesn't deserve his wealth?

 

What do you mean you don't understand how anyone deserves to get rich off Somali oil? If Somalis shouldn't get rich off the oil, then who should?

 

I'm referring to the sale of the oil itself , not the industries that many great entrepreneurs will build around it. The money from production should be used for infrastructure projects only, that way the facilities required for any Somali to excel will be intact. The billionaires most commonly seen in the Gulf countries most often consist of members of the monarchy and aren't self made. Rather than defining what role their natural resources plays in their economy like Iran does, they let their oil define them. They play no role in the manufacturing of equipment used to extract their oil, the engineering involved in producing their oil, or in the research and development of more efficient usage of it. They are truly slaves of their own fortunes.