Trump's "take the oil"
before we left...
Someone needed to ask him "How, logistically, do we do that?"
As of 2013, Iraq had proven oil reserves of some 140 B barrels. And there are estimates that at least twice that likely exist in unproven oil fields.
To pump that out of the ground would take a very long time... to ship it somewhere, even using the mostly now defunct class of ULCC (ultra large crude carriers) that can hold up to 2 M barrels of crude each would take 70,000 shiploads... and this class of carrier is mostly been scrapped in recent years because they have to offload outside of ports which proved more costly than simply using VLCCs instead.
Even if you could get 70 or so ULCCs and do a 1000 loads each, it would still take years and years to move that much crude to the US (estimating a round trip time for each tanker at around 20 to 30 days). The pre-war production from these vast oil fields was only around 2 million barrels a day... so 70,000 days of oil or we drill baby drill... at a huge cost to the US taxpayer.
Then what? We have no storage facilities that large here... pumping into underground oil fields in the US would be very difficult without new large pipelines from the ports to these solid rock formations... not to mention the loss of crude oil by doing so. Refining it would also take years as storing the products on that scale is simply unheard of. The current system is tight... from oil well to your tank is a matter of only a few days to weeks.
Not to mention that stealing oil from the Iraqi people (to the victors go the spoils is what I think he said) is a war crime. And if we did commit such theft... what would that do to domestic oil producers? The glut of oil and natural gas that we have produced in this country by fracking has already decimated the coal industry (and not government regulations). This is something I rate as a good thing as coal is just so much more destructive than natural gas... but we don't need an extra 140 B barrels of crude oil sitting around.
Logistically such an idea is simply not doable. It is much better to leave the oil in the ground.
As for leaving a force behind to protect the oil fields.. the 2000 or so oil wells (compare to a million in Texas) cover an area of hundreds of square miles... we would likely have to leave at least 100,000 troops for decades to protect "our oil" if we leave it in the ground.
Even when Trump said it... I was like "wait a minute... even if we decided that this was legally and morally OK... it just isn't possible in a small period of time"... so I decided to do a bit of internet research and math.
= new reply since forum marked as read
which we never found (except for the expired chemical weapons we sold Iraq in the 80s).
It was never about the oil.
To take the oil ( outright steal it) is a war crime... and, as I just pointed out, logistically impossible.
And the amount of oil in Syria and western Iraq is still enough to make ISIS a *lot* of money.
So we (and the russians) have been taking out any oil tanker trucks that we find in ISIS controlled regions. I am sure that they are still smuggling it out, however that just became harder as Turkey has launched a ground offensive in norther Syria and at this point, no ISIS controlled areas are on the Turkish border so it makes smuggling oil over the border into Turkey somewhat harder.
Obama's war against ISIS is working... but it is (as he said) taking a long time. The good news is that we aren't committing massive troops into the region and bombing the shit out of random towns... and this will likely let us win instead of creating even more resentment with the locals (who then create a new terrorist organization to "kill the infidels in the west"
. It's a good theory... better than what we did last time in Iraq that led directly to the current situation.
I would strongly disagree with that. It was widely reported that Cheney and his Haliburton pals were pouring over the Iraqi oil field maps.
I followed this closely back then. Every chemical stock pile we came across was old, mostly rendered inert or inoperable and was largely supplied by this man.
I firmly believe we had an operational understanding of what was there.
Trump = Buffoon King Con 