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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Pipeline fire kills power across nation

Jim Krane Associated Press

KIRKUK, Iraq – Saboteurs wrecked a recently repaired pipeline junction Tuesday, and the fire set off a cascade of power blackouts that underlined frustrations faced by U.S. engineers trying to upgrade northern Iraq’s creaky oil facilities in the face of relentless bombings.

The 3 a.m. attack blew up a junction where multiple oil pipelines cross the Tigris River at the northern city of Beiji. The burning oil melted power cables, causing a short that knocked power plants offline and cut electricity across Iraq until late afternoon, officials said.

The breach also shut down the pipeline ferrying crude oil from Kirkuk’s huge oilfield to an export terminal in Ceyhan, Turkey. With crude oil selling above $40 a barrel, the frequent sabotage has cost Iraq more than $2 billion, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has said.

“If you build it they will come – and try to blow it up,” said Lt. Col. Lee Morrison, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer who heads a Kirkuk-based oil security team. “It’s definitely one step forward, one step back. You fix it and it blows up.”

Instead of being sold on the international market, oil burned on the desert and poured, still aflame, into the Tigris River. Aerial photos showed flaming slicks of oil floating downstream while black smoke billowed into mammoth columns visible 25 miles away.

Officials at the state-run North Oil Co. said the flames were extinguished late Tuesday.

Jan Stuart, head of energy research at FIMAT USA, a brokerage unit of Societe Generale, said the attack added to tight oil supplies that have pushed prices up.

“It is a risk that is evidently there. Quite simply, a refiner cannot count on getting that crude and needs to bid up prices to secure crude from somewhere else,” he told the Associated Press from New York. “The risk of interruption is in the price, and that risk is borne out time and again.”

Especially disheartening for Morrison, the sabotage came just two days after Northern Oil engineers completed a two-month replacement of critical valves destroyed by a previous bombing.

“They already know it’s a critical point because they’ve blown it up before,” Morrison said in frustration, sitting in an office with walls covered by pipeline maps including one marked with several yellow circles denoting previous pipeline blasts.

Morrison, 44, of St. Petersburg, Fla., said U.S. soldiers dropped off spools of concertina wire to block access to the repaired valves two days ago, but Iraqi authorities had not yet erected them.

Iraqi officials are struggling to protect the country’s vast oil infrastructure in both the north and south against attacks by insurgents who are seeking to destabilize Allawi’s interim government.

Morrison heads the Kirkuk office of Task Force Shield, which oversees a guard force of some 6,500 Iraqis who are supposed to take over protection of northern oil facilities when a $70 million contract with a British security firm, Erinys, expires Dec. 31.

Morrison said the Iraqi force is too small to protect the huge network of oil wells, pipelines and plants

In Saddam Hussein’s day, officials here say tens of thousands of soldiers guarded the northern fields, occupying concrete blockhouses that can still be seen on hilltops looking over the wells and miles of rusting piping.

Even without the bombings, Iraq’s oil infrastructure is saddled with problems that prevent the country from reaping the full value of Kirkuk’s oil, which accounts for 6 percent of the world’s known reserves.

Run efficiently with modern equipment, Kirkuk’s fields could yield 1.1 million barrels a day – more than double the current production, analysts estimate.

And there are problems in the refining process that produces gasoline and other consumer products. Northern Oil’s 40-year-old technology can convert only about half the crude piped into it while modern equipment is able to refine more than 99 percent, Morrison said.

The U.S.-led invasion added to problems when American warplanes bombed a bridge spanning the Tigris River at Beiji, which is 155 miles north of Baghdad.

Apparently unknown to U.S. war planners, 18 separate pipelines ran underneath the bridge, Morrison said, and all were severed. Most remain broken.