Iraqi oil officials say they are losing 400,000 barrels a day to attacks on the oil infrastructure in the increasingly violent country.
Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq's oil minister, said Tuesday attacks on the pipeline from Kirkuk to ports in Turkey are greatly hampering the country's main source of revenue.
About 96 percent of Iraq's budget comes from oil revenue, Washington-based PFC Energy reports.
But Kirkuk itself, which sits on an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil, is highly contested by the Kurds in the north who claim it as a historical city and Sunnis in the center who have no other source of oil income if the country is divided into three parts.
Meanwhile the Kurdistan Regional Government has threatened to secede from Iraq if the central government doesn't recognize oil contracts it has signed for developing fields in the region.
It claims the right to and cites the vaguely worded constitution.
Shahristani, however, said the central government doesn't need to respect the deals and an on-going feud is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
Shahristani said he expects oil production to increase to 4.5 million barrels a day by 2010 and six million by 2012.
That's possible, experts believe, with increased investment in an oil infrastructure rocked by attacks.
Current oil production is at about 2.4 million barrels a day, most analysts say, below pre-war levels and far below the 2.89 million barrels a day Shahristani said last week was being produced.
Iraq has an estimated 115 billion barrels in proven reserves but it hasn't been fully explored and reserves could drastically increase.
UPI
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