Oil crisis affects U.S. policy on Iraq, sya experts

www.etaiwannews.com Venezuelan standoff could make war in Persian Gulf more costly to America's economy than once anticipated 2003-01-12 / New York Times / WASHINGTON

The crisis in Venezuela is creating major new complications for the Bush administration's campaign to oust President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, causing oil shortages that would probably make a Persian Gulf war more costly to the economy than once anticipated, American officials and industry experts said.

The 40-day strike has virtually shut down Venezuela's oil industry, the fifth-largest in the world, and proven more difficult to resolve than the administration expected, the officials said.

Efforts to end the stalemate between President Hugo Chavez and his opponents have been hamstrung not only by the intransigence of both sides in Venezuela, but also mistrust toward American diplomats, the officials added.

Venezuela has for decades been one of the most dependable sources of petroleum for the United States, where industry analysts say the strike has already hurt some refineries and driven up the retail price of gasoline by at least a dime a gallon.

Those shortages will only worsen, and prices continue to rise, if the United States attacks Iraq, they predicted. That means that war in the Persian Gulf could prove more costly to the American economy than had been projected if the Venezuelan standoff is not ended soon.

For that reason the Bush administration has been debating plans to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which contains nearly 600 million gallons of crude. For now, though, the White House has decided to defer those plans, mainly to keep oil available in case of war in Iraq, administration officials said.

"A few months ago everybody thought that if we went to war in Iraq oil wouldn't be a major problem, because there was enough spare capacity to make up for lost Iraqi oil," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation Inc., a research organization. "But no one then was contemplating lost Venezuelan oil."

"Now," he said, "we won't have enough spare capacity to take care of both those events."

The crisis could be compounded if President Chavez follows through on a proposal to split the government-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., into two parts and restructure its central offices.

American officials say Chavez's true goal is to install political loyalists in place of the union leaders and senior managers at the oil company, known as PDVSA, who have joined the strike.

The result could be a more pliable but less efficient company that produces less oil than the roughly three million barrels a day that Venezuela produced before the strike, officials and experts said. That could leave the United States even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil, the experts said.

"Petroleos is one of the few state-owned oil companies in the OPEC group that approximates a normal integrated major oil company," said Leonidas P. Drollas, chief economist with the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. Echoing other industry analysts, Drollas added, "To break it up into anything sounds obviously politically motivated."

The Bush administration, acknowledging the growing danger from the Venezuelan strike, has stepped up its efforts to calm the oil markets, lobbying major oil exporters to increase production. At a meeting in Vienna this weekend, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is expected to vote to increase production by 8.7 percent, or nearly two million barrels a day, officials said.

Some oil analysts argue that the administration should have moved faster to stabilize the oil market. Those analysts, along with some members of Congress, have urged the administration to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Even a relatively modest "loan" of 20 million to 30 million barrels to American refineries would stabilize prices and ease short-term disruptions, giving the OPEC countries time to ramp up production. It typically takes 30 to 45 days for Persian Gulf oil to reach the United States.

The impact of the Venezuelan crisis has been widely underestimated by officials and consumers, oil experts said. Venezuela once exported 2.7 million barrels a day, 1.5 million barrels of that going to Untied States, or about 14 percent of America's crude oil imports.

Now, Venezuela says it is producing about 600,000 barrels a day, though outside experts estimate the volume at less than 400,000 barrels.

That means that more than two million barrels a day of Venezuelan crude have been removed from the global market, making this the worst disruption in supply since the Persian Gulf war of 1991, experts said.