Another good article from http://www.theoildrum.com/. Some interesting charts and maps. The first chart shows that Iran produced 6 million barrels of oil per day in the 1970s. The Islamic revolution and the brutal war with Iraq resulted in a collapse of their oil production. It has barely reached 4 million barrels per day since the early 1990s. They are unable to ramp up production due to sanctions and the lack of technological expertise. More than 60% of their exports go to the far east. China, Japan and India will not be happy if Israel and the U.S. decide to teach Iran a lesson.
I’ve always been geographically challenged. I never realized the size of Iran. Take a really good look at that map. Iran dominates the Middle East. Take a long hard look at the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Approximately 15 oil tankers per day, carrying 34% of the world’s oil supply, must traverse a 6 mile wide traffic lane. Imagine what would happen to worldwide oil prices if this Strait was shutdown. The Iranians aren’t stupid. This is their trump card.
Imagine how many soldiers it would take to subdue a country this large. Cruise missiles and B1 bombers aren’t going to defeat Iran. We’d just be killing thousands of innocent Iranians. The neo-cons like Gingrich and Romney act like taking out Iran will be a piece of cake. When have the neo-cons ever been wrong? The sanctions and embargoes are designed to force Iran to do something stupid. They will be attacked no matter what they do. The unintended consequences will likely lead to the next phase of this Fourth Turning.
Iran – Possible Implications of an Oil Embargo
Posted by Euan Mearns on December 6, 2011 – 6:30am
Does Thursday’s announcement that the EU is considering to ban oil imports from Iran epitomise the draining of power from west to east? The big winners here will be China and India, who do not fear rising Iranian influence and who will gladly soak up any additional oil exports they may have to offer. However, ending this small dependency upon Iranian oil imports in Europe (Figure 2) does clear the way for military action without the need to ponder the immediate consequences on oil imports.
Figure 1 Iran displays export land traits where growing domestic consumption is eating into the oil available for export that has been declining slowly since 2003. Data from BP. Y-axis is barrels per day (1000s). Balance = production less consumption which is a proxy for net exports. Production = crude+condensate+NGL whilst consumption may include refinery “gains” and bio-fuel. In many countries there is also an active two-way trade in crude and refined products.
In a week where the UK embassy in Iran was overrun and the two countries are breaking off diplomatic ties, on the back of heightened concern about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and an unexplained explosion at an Iranian missile launching site, the EU has decided to flex its muscles and to ban Iranian oil imports. The big winners here are the other countries importing oil from Iran – Japan, China, India and South Korea. Does the EU really believe that in today’s extremely tight oil market that oil sanctions against Iran will worry them in the least?
Figure 2 Table from a worthy article on Iranian oil and demographics posted on Crude Oil Peak details the countries importing oil from Iran in 2008. The four EU countries to be affected by any embargo will be Italy, Spain, Greece and France. Given that Greece and Spain are already in recession and that Italy and France are heading in that direction, it seems likely that their oil consumption will already be on the wane and that losing these relatively small amounts of Iranian imports will have little consequence.
Figure 3 OPEC net exports (production consumption balance from BP) showing the importance of The Gulf states.
With the risks of armed conflict against Iran increasing with every week that passes it is important to grasp what this may mean for global oil markets. Two end points seem to exist. The first is where “the West”, i.e. NATO or some other looser alliance ± Israel launches a cruise missile attack (conventional) against Iran’s nuclear facilities. destroying them. In that eventuality Iran, with current leadership, would be unlikely to ever again export oil to “the West”, but since at that point The West will not be importing any oil from Iran this would not matter.
Figure 4 Iranian oil infrastructure, setting in the Arabian or Persian Gulf and the linch pin location of The Straights of Hormuz. Map from Wikipedia.
The second more extreme scenario is that armed conflict spreads, compromising oil exports through the Straights of Hormuz. Oil exports from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Iraq and Iran all pass through Hormuz. Data is not available for Iraq, but exports from Saudi, Kuwait, UAE and Qatar stood at around 12,805,000 bpd in 2010. The global net export market stood at around 35,173,000 and so these 4 countries alone account for around 36.4% of the global export market (excluding Iraq and Iran). Should these exports cease, albeit temporarily, the oil price will go through the roof, causing severe trauma to the global economy, including China.
In addition, there are significant liquefied natural gas exports from Qatar that pass through Hormuz on a daily basis. According to BP, Qatar exported around 96 BCM of gas in 2010 (Figure 5) to the countries shown in Figure 6. In Europe, the UK, Spain, and Belgium would be most affected by disruption to LNG supplies from the Gulf whilst in Asia, India, S Korea, and Japan would be most affected. This highlights the increasingly exposed nature of OECD energy supplies where electricity supplies may be threatened by armed conflicts on the other side of the world.
Figure 5 Production / consumption balance for natural gas in Qatar.
Figure 6 Destinations of LNG exports from Qatar in 2010.
I think they are ACHING to open up the Bakken oil fields, but won’t do it until the price of oil is sky high and they shut down competition from Iran.
newsjunkie
The Bakken oil fields are open.
I hope the unintended consequences don’t lead to world war III.
Why are they delaying the decision on the pipeline to the Gulf Coast?
newsjunkie
I thought the greenies were holding up the pipeline.
NJ:
My tinfoil says that most US energy production is being preserved for future plunder…
That’s exactly what I think – it won’t go on the market until the price is right.
If Paul isn’t the nominee I might just pull the lever for Barry as our only hope of avoiding another pointless war and I’m not even sure that would do it. I wish Paul had the balls to tell the nation that our real enemy is Israel and it’s subversion of our government.
Zara
The Jewish organization running one of the debates banned Ron from the debate.
The greenies are controlled opposition.
I think most Jews would be pro-Ron Paul if they truly understood his message. One of the difficulties, I think, is that there are plenty of anti-semites who support him and it turns off Jews, but I’m doing what I can and my mother-in-law, who is a rabid life-long Democrat, now supports him.
Admin says:
“I never realized the size of Iran. Take a really good look at that map. Iran dominates the Middle East.”
Now take a look at why we entered Iraq and Afghanistan. “Like a good neighbor, U.S. is there.”
And, the Iranians couldn’t take out Saddam Husshit’s army after 7 years of trying. GHWB did it in 96 hours. Iranian soldiers will fold like a sanitary napkin.
Dave:
Apples and oranges.
The war through the 80’s was a proxy war…
“Saddams Army” turned insurgent.
Discounting Iran is one thing, but the dominoes are teetering already…
Of course we could kick the shit out of ANY standing army…. and in all truth, I’d hide behind one IDF soldier over 20 Persians in a bar fight…
That’s not the point though.
Naturally Jim. Ron is probably the only congressman who hasn’t taken the mandatory annual pilgrimmage to Jerusalem. I was once a supporter of Israel. I heard Moshe Dayan speak once and was greatly impressed. Neocons call me an anti-semite all the time and I am beginning to wonder myself.
Let’s face it. Jews, who comprise 1% of the population of the US, control entertainment, media and much of the corrupt banking system. Israel through it’s proxies controls congress and the presidency every bit as much as the MNC’s. While not solely to blame, Jews are culpable in the destruction of this nation and that is simply a fact that cannot be spun. I do not favor and would never support any nazi approach but when americans wake up to the real enemies, they (both the guilty and the innocent) will pay for their crimes. That is unless american don’t wake up until it’s too late, which is the likely outcome.
Ron Paul: We should be their friend and their trading partner. They are a democracy and we share many values with them. But we should not be their master. We should not dictate where their borders will be nor should we have veto power over their foreign policy.
Zara, do you have a problem with that? Or do you think Ron Paul was sugar-coating his real thoughts?
Zara: I am no neo-con, and surely I wonder myself if you aren’t simply anti-semitic.
I can’t change your mind and quite frankly don’t care to.
That being said… do you think it’s as simple as “the jews did it”? Honestly… if I was an anglo-banker in control of the system I would heap that shit out there with gusto…
You sound like a christmas dinner at a latin family’s house.
newsjunkie, that’s a start. What I would do is issue an executive order banning lobbying of congress by agencies of a foreign government. That would take care of AIPAC and it’s subsidiaries. Then I’d ponder breaking off diplomatic relations until Israel reaches an agreement with the Palestinians…But yes, I think RP is sugarcoating his thoughts.
colma, frankly I don’t care if anyone calls me an anti-semite. I don’t think I’m any more so than Michael Sheuer, who says the same stuff as I.
What I would do is issue an executive order banning lobbying of congress by agencies of a foreign government
-Zara
I can agree with that… otherwise, why have a State Department?
Zara, I appreciate your thoughts. Even though you have identified yourself as a hater, I haven’t really found that to be true. You just have a worldview that I haven’t experienced.
“No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest.”
― John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
(see Admin’s quotes today)
iWhy are they aching for a war? Because not a single one of their neo-con asses have worn the uniform, carried a gun, or served their country. Save McCain, but I don’t know what the fuck has gotten into him.
There is a saying “Amateurs talk strategy, real generals discuss logistics.” That was the fatal flaw in Iraq and the way they’re playing it, in Iran too. It won’t be that hard to push into Iran with troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Uzi-beki-beki-stan-stan, and 3 carrier battle groups within spitting distance.
What will be the trick is sustaining the early victories and death by a thousand cuts the US will endure once on the ground. But we’re already being regaled with WMD tales again, and now a FBI agent turns up begging for rescue. We’re being set up to invade Iran, and come hell or high water, we’re going in. Iran has our oil, and we aim to get it back.
HOO-AHH!
not to mention the geography is quite varied. The East is a open plain, in the West and north it is mountainous like Afghanistan.
An Invasion or attack on Iran would be a disaster on so many levels.
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
-James Madison
The Persians (Iranians) have held their homeland for 2,600+ years. They’ve always been warlike. they don’t get along with israel (think ‘Purim Festival’). They are not going to be kicked off of their plateau or kept under our thumb by any army we care to send.
Speaking of which, 70% of high school seniors are not eligible for military service, due to obesity, inability to pass the ASVAB, criminal background, drug use, medical issues (asthma, etc.) and so forth. We lack the troops. We’re 14 billion in debt, not counting unfunded mandates; those add $100 trillion to our woes, so we cannot afford this fight. Finally, war consumes resources; I doubt that Americans would stomach rationing as stoically as their grandparents did in WW2.
War with Iran is something that bin Laden must’ve dreamed about. Let’s work to ensure that the Newt Romney wing of our politics never gets a chance to pull the trigger.
Zara
You say you don’t approve of a Nazi-like approach.
But, when you blame the Jews for practically ALL the ills we suffer … the inevitable result, eventually, would be just that. Singling out one group as the scapegoat can only lead to gas chambers.
That’s just my opinion.
ssgconway
I clearly remember the cries of “WOE!” when we took on Iraq. Many, many pundits said we would lose tens of thousands of Americans in Baghdad alone.
Going to war with Iran is just fucking insane. It would be a disaster on many fronts for us. But for the Iranians? Their country would be destroyed. They are not invincible, by any stretch of the imagination.
Then again, I don’t know shit.
A little thing here, a small mention there…. they did this, they did that.
I don’t like it. Not one bit.
What a clusterfuck that can turn nuclear….
“There are two things in this world that scare me, and one is nuclear war…”
-Austin Powers
Stucky, we may ‘win’ the conventional war, but not the asymmetrical, 4th-generation war the Persians would fight with us. The Western M.O. in war hasn’t changed since the fall of Rome: Emperor Maurice, in his ‘Stragetikon’ noted that Franks should never be met on ground favorable to their heavy calvary charge, as their ‘shock and awe’ would carry the day. He recommended long-range standoff. that’s exactly what the Persians have always done – long-range standoff vs. calvary charges. They have traded mounted archers for newer weapons, but they’ll use the same tactics – as anybody with common sense would when facing our firepower. We’d be sucked into a meat-grinder 3X Iraq, only now with an Army that’s been at war for a decade.
That’s all just a quibble, really, as neither one of us wants this war. Thanks for sharing your thoughts; I enjoy reading them.
Stucky says- Going to war with Iran is just fucking insane.
Every war We the sheep have been cajoled into has been insane.
When the will of We is easliy co-opted by the US without as much as an overt whimper and used to support murder and mayhem by a Thugacracy, not only across the globe , but here at home as well ,the we have indeed become our own worst enemy.
No one can force anyone to believe even to most easily disproved lie, but millions of Americans do so without hardly as much as a gentle prod from those that profit from disinformation and propaganda.
BTW, Stuck thanks for the graph of global bases currently being occupied by Leviathan…scary… …the stuff of Orwellian nightmares,
http://lewrockwell.com/kenny/kenny85.1.html
Most shifts in history do not come with easy-to-remember dates associated with them. I could not tell you exactly when the U.S. war with Mexico began, though that war gave flesh and blood and considerable real estate to the U.S. claim that our “Manifest Destiny” was to push on through our western frontier “from sea to shining sea” and eventually become a power in the Pacific, where we would come into conflict with imperial Japan at a place called Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor was a Pacific outpost where our naval vessels and men were left in harm’s way to provide Japan with the target it was looking for, to make an attack President Roosevelt was waiting for. The attack, on the “date that will live in infamy,” would provide the United States with overwhelming justification for entering World War II against the Axis powers.
I also know we are supposed to “Remember the Maine,” the incident of alleged sabotage that sparked the Spanish-American War that left the United States in possession of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and a permanent naval base in Cuba. But I don’t remember the exact date of that incident that occurred in 1898.
Neither do I remember the date of a 2002 conversation I had with a friend who seemed determined to support the policy of George W. Bush to create a war with Iraq. Our nation was already at war in Afghanistan as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration seemed to be saying that war with Iraq was the logical next step. Many had assumed, therefore, that Iraq and that old villain from Central Casting, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with masterminding the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the aborted planned attack on the White House. There was no evidence to bear that out, but it was hard to hear the facts over the beating of the neocon war drums.
So at some point in that summer of 2002, I asked my good Republican friend why he believed we needed to go to war with Iraq. His answer startled me.
“Because I believe my government.”
AIPAC Economic Warfare Also Targets US
From Stolen US Trade Secrets to Iran’s Central Bank
by Grant Smith, December 10, 2011
| Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is trumpeting tough new sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank. This financial blockade will likely drive up global energy prices as Iran struggles to sell petroleum to wholesalers fearful of secondary boycotts. That the sources of this latest step toward US military action against Iran are mainly Israel lobbying groups or beneficiaries of their campaign finance network has been well-established. The lobby justifies the campaign based on unsubstantiated allegations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons although no evidence from credible sources has emerged. Less well known is that Israel and its lobby frequently deploy tactics from same menu of economic warfare — such as capturing assets — against the United States. Newly declassified documents extracted from a very reluctant US Trade Representative are a case in point.
In 1984 the captured assets in question were also of the intangible variety — trade secrets, strategies, and classified industry data. The victims were more than seventy US corporations and business organizations that responded to US International Trade Commission solicitations in 1984 to participate in negotiations that would open the US market to Israeli exports. After delivering up their confidential business data in opposition to the preferences, participants were appalled that the Israeli government pilfered all the USTR’s classified report and passed it to AIPAC to lobby against US industries. But what made this captured US intellectual asset so valuable and timely? After a multi-year battle that began in 2009, the US Trade Representative was finally forced to publicly release (PDFs) the majority of the secret report surreptitiously obtained by AIPAC decades ago. The secret document reveals all.
One section of the report details the efforts of Israel’s state-owned and heavily subsidized bromine industry to muscle out anxious US producers based in Arkansas. In another, Israeli tomato producers subsidized by government price supports, fight for market access against principled US opposition. Why did AIPAC need American gold rope chain producer confidential business data and industry talking points of all things? At the time, three quarters of Israel’s gold rope chain industry capacity was idle. AIPAC and its foreign principal needed to replace the uncertain market access granted by the Generalized System of Preferences with permanent, unreciprocated zero-tariff, US-market trade preferences. But first AIPAC and Israel needed to know everything American producers were secretly telling the Reagan administration. Stealing that section of the report (PDF) was the most efficient way.
The report — still not fully released — is a treasure-trove of market insights, production costs, US industry lobbying positions and internal corporate data unobtainable from any legitimate source. Israel and its foreign agents — with the purloined data and ill-gotten, unreciprocated market access — have been able to create a captive US market for up to 40 percent of Israel’s total exports. Meanwhile, American exporters continue to complain about being locked out of Israel’s market. Other illicit acts followed the theft of trade data. According to another recently-released secret document, an audit conducted by the US State Department’s Sherman Funk, increased preferential access to sensitive US technology enabled Israel to freely copy and resell it to the highest bidder. This was enabled by US government infighting at the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
A bona fide review of unrelenting Israeli economic warfare against the United States, including the granddaddy of them all, stealing US nuclear material and technology, raises a fundamental question: why does America continue to put up with all this?
The unsurprising answer is that our core institutions responsible for holding elite Israel lobbyists in check have all been infiltrated and corrupted. This has left average Americans exposed to the economic and moral consequences as the Justice and Treasury Departments simply look the other way. With a bit more law enforcement, Abraham Feinberg would have been prosecuted as a WWII draft dodger, rather than free to launch his Israel lobbying career stuffing Harry Truman and LBJ’s pockets with cash while secretly funding the Israeli nuclear weapons program. The Zionist Organization of America and AIPAC would both have been openly registered as agents of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And the alphabet soup of Israel’s covert operators, from Nahum Bernstein (who financed illegal weapons diversions) to Douglas Bloomfield (who illegally duplicated the stolen classified trade document for AIPAC), would actually have served prison time for their crimes.
But rule of law and enforcement has seized up when it comes to the Israel lobby, from election law violations to capture of assets. Until it is restored, Americans will continue to suffer the consequences of economic warfare directed against Israel’s enemies and its largest benefactor.
Colma…”That’s not the point though.”
That was my point.
Hot debate. What do you think? 2 7
Wow. I get 7 thumbs down for mentioning sanitary napkins.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike: 10 3
And Zara gets 10 thumbs up for hating Jews.
Would it help if I said the Stay Frees were made by a Jew?
“Freedom brings people together” Ron Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hyOruc72r44
Stucky writes, “Singling out one group as the scapegoat can only lead to gas chambers.”
I’ve always been a big fan of Carole King. Does that count?
WOW. LOOK AT THE ADMINISTRATOR BEING A COUPLE DAYS EARLY ON HIS WARNING:
Iran Military Practicing Straits Of Hormuz Closure
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/12/2011 08:01 -0500
And just in case a brutal reminder that nothing is solved in Europe is not enough, here comes Iran:
IRAN MP SAYS MILITARY TO PRACTISE CLOSING STRAIT OF HORMUZ TO SHIPPING; IRANIAN MILITARY DECLINES TO COMMENT – RTRS
More as we see it.