KARABILA, Iraq: In a remote patch of the Anbar desert just 30 kilometers from the Syrian border, a single blue pillar of flanges and valves sits atop an enormous deposit of oil and natural gas that would be routine in this petroleum-rich country except for one fact — this is Sunni territory.
Huge petroleum deposits have long been known in Iraq's Kurdish north and Shiite south. But now, Iraq has substantially increased its estimates of the amount of oil and natural gas in deposits on Sunni lands after quietly paying foreign oil companies tens of millions of dollars over the past two years to re- examine old seismic data across the country and retrain Iraqi petroleum engineers.
The development is likely to have significant political effects: the lack of natural resources in the central and western regions where Sunnis hold sway has fed their disenchantment with the nation they once ruled. And it has driven their insistence on a strong central government, one that would collect oil revenues and spread them equitably among the country's factions, rather than any division of the country along sectarian regional boundaries.
Although Western and Iraqi engineers have always known that there are some oil formations beneath Sunni lands, the issue is coming into much sharper focus with the new studies, according to senior Iraqi Oil Ministry officials. The question of where Iraq's oil reserves are concentrated is taking on still more importance as it appears that negotiators are close to agreement on a long-debated oil law that would regulate how Iraqi and international oil companies would be allowed to develop Iraq's fields.
The new studies have increased estimates of the amount of oil in a series of deposits in Sunni territory to the north and east of Baghdad and in a series of deposits that run through western Iraq like beads on a string, and could contain as much as a trillion cubic feet, or .03 trillion cubic meters, of natural gas. And while it would take years to actually begin pulling gas and oil out of the fields even if the area soon became safe enough for companies to work in, energy corporations have been excited about the area's potential, even if it falls short of reserves in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.
The analysis, still little known outside a small circle of specialists, is important enough that on Friday, Brigadier General John Allen of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, who is deputy commanding general of Multi-National Force-West, which has responsibility for Anbar Province, made the long trip into the desert to visit the blue wellhead. Allen's duties include promoting the economic development of Anbar. The deposit beneath is the Akkas field, one of the beads on the string that runs from Nineveh Province in the north to the border with Saudi Arabia in the south.
"It's phenomenal standing here," Allen said. "What this does is, it gives Anbar and the Sunnis an economic future different from phosphate and cement," he said, referring to products of some of the aging factories in the area.
"This gives them a future and a hope," he said. Nearby, a few pieces of laundry flapped in front of one of the only structures in sight, a cinder-block shack probably belonging to a shepherd.
Iraqi oil production peaked at around 3.7 million barrels a day in 1979, as Saddam Hussein was coming to power, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The figure fell and rose over the years and stood at 2.6 million barrels a day just before the 2003 invasion. Current production is less than the prewar figure, a major disappointment for the American and Iraqi engineers who have struggled to rebuild the national oil infrastructure.
That production has always been concentrated in the north and south. But at various times, Iraq has drilled a few exploratory wells in the Anbar desert and in a series of deposits north and east of Baghdad, where there has also been limited production, Natik al- Bayati, director of reservoirs and field development at the Ministry of Oil, said in a recent interview.
For all of its wells, Iraq has also collected seismic data — records of the tremors that ripple through Earth's crust and can be used like X-rays to investigate underground structures. But Iraq's long isolation from the rest of the world meant that the data had never been analyzed with the latest technology, Bayati said in the interview, which was attended by his chief geologist and another ministry expert on reservoirs and authorized by the oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani.
It was partly for that reason, Bayati said, that Iraq allocated up to $25 million each for agreements with some 40 international oil companies, which have provided training, legal consulting, and technical help — including access to the latest software — with the data analysis. In the process, "We got some pleasant surprises," Bayati said.
A re-examination of one series of wells running from Taji, just north of Baghdad, to an area southeast of the capital nearly doubled the estimate of recoverable reserves after raising the estimated total to around 15 billion barrels, Bayati said. That is one of a series of similar structures that form a brevet- like pattern in Sunni areas north of Baghdad and are still being studied, he said. Current estimates for all proven reserves in Iraq amount to about 115 billion barrels.
Bayati said that the studies, which were conducted across the whole country, also increased estimates of the natural gas reserves in Sunni-dominated Nineveh and Anbar provinces in the west. He said that the amount of natural gas that could theoretically be extracted from the Akkas field alone would be the energy equivalent of around 100,000 barrels of oil a day.
The promise of the oil and gas fields in Sunni territory comes with numerous cautions, including the challenges of doing almost anything at all with the fields as long as Iraq remains such a dangerous place to work, particularly for foreign companies with substantial expertise and resources.
Even if companies can develop the fields, it could be years before wells can be dug and pipelines built to move the oil and gas from the fields.