Iraq - It's the oil industry stoopid - more attacks on refineries

This is a photograph after a Katyusha rocket attack at 6.00 a.m. (2200 EST) on Monday but the plant was still operating, Oil Ministry spokesman Assim Jihad said.

The blaze was due to a fire in a storage tank for refined crude at the Doura refinery, sending a large plume of smoke into the sky.

Rockets also hit the Karrada district in central Baghdad and the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi parliament, the U.S. embassy and many government buildings, police said. Al -Doura produces some 80 % of the oil for the domestic market. The strike occurred two days after a truck bomb was detonated close to the country’s largest refinery at Baiji in the north of the country, which handles about 300,000 barrels a day from Kirkuk, according to Iraq's Oil Ministry (Baltimore Sun) . At least six police officers were killed and more than a dozen people wounded in that attack. (Reuters/ Xinhua )

All American Patriots reports that the U.S. military says an oil refinery fire in Baghdad Monday was the result of an industrial accident, not a mortar attack as Iraqi officials initially reported.

The military says U.S. soldiers who arrived at the Doura refinery in southern Baghdad determined that a pipe explosion caused the fire.

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, ****monitors security issues related to energy and say since the illegal invasion in March 2003, more than 460 attacks have been carried out against Iraq's oil installations or industry employees. These have includedregular bombing along pipelines, including one on Friday about 10 miles northeast of Baiji that sent oil spilling into the Tigris River.

The attacks have left Iraq's oil industry struggling to increase exports, on which 90% of the country's revenue is based. Before the war, Iraq exported about 2.3 million barrels per day. Last year, it averaged 1.6 million barrels daily.

In an interview Friday on Iraq's Al Hurra television, Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani said exports had reached 2 million barrels a day recently.

"Thank God for those high oil prices," he said.( L A Times)

**** Gal Luft of IAGS in Esquire "Four ways to solve the Energy Crisis"... "Even if every single kernel of corn grown in America were converted to ethanol, it would still only replace about 12 percent of America's gasoline requirement.""