Those who claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to get control of the country's giant oil reserves will be left scratching their heads by the results of last weekend's auction of Iraqi oil contracts: Not a single U.S. company secured a deal in the auction of contracts that will shape the Iraqi oil industry for the next couple of decades. Two of the most lucrative of the multi-billion-dollar oil contracts went to two countries which bitterly opposed the U.S. invasion — Russia and China — while even Total Oil of France, which led the charge to deny international approval for the war at the U.N. Security Council in 2003, won a bigger stake than the Americans in the most recent auction. "[The distribution of oil contracts] certainly answers the theory that the war was for the benefit of big U.S. oil interests," says Alex Munton, Middle East oil analyst for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, whose clients include major U.S. companies. "That has not been demonstrated by what has happened this week."
In one of the biggest auctions held anywhere in the 150-year history of the oil industry, executives from across the world flew into Baghdad on Dec. 11 for a two-day, red-carpet ceremony at the Oil Ministry, broadcast live in Iraq. With U.S. military helicopters hovering overhead to help ward off a possible insurgent attack, Oil Minister Hussein Al-Shahrastani unsealed envelopes from each company, stating how much oil it would produce, and what it was willing to accept in payment from Iraq's government. Rather than giving foreign oil companies control over Iraqi reserves, as the U.S. had hoped to do with the Oil Law it failed to get the Iraqi parliament to pass, the oil companies were awarded service contracts lasting 20 years for seven of the 10 oil fields on offer — the oil will remain the property of the Iraqi state, and the foreign companies will pump it for a fixed price per barrel.
Far from behaving like the war-ravaged, bankrupt country that it is, Iraq heavily weighted the contracts in its own favor, demanding a low per-barrel price and signing bonuses of up to $150 million. Only one U.S. company, Occidental Petroleum Corp., joined the bidding last weekend, and lost. (ExxonMobil had hoped to land the lucrative Rumaila field, but lost out to an alliance between the Chinese National Petroleum Company and BP because it declined the Iraqi government's $2-a-barrel fee.)
Russia's Lukoil, CNPC, and RoyalDutchShell accepted fees of between $1.15 and $1.40 for every barrel they produce — that's about 2% of Friday's oil futures price of $73 a barrel. "No one thinks it will be easy to make money on these contracts," says Samuel Ciszuk, Middle East energy analyst at IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting company in London. "Companies have been willing to come in very, very low just to get their foot in the door in Iraq."
