RATQA OIL FIELD, Kuwait — Aydeh Rashed is braced for hell.

Bundled tight in a woolen windbreaker, the deputy chairman of Kuwait Oil Co.’s emergency operations committee points a finger through a tempest of filthy wet sand moving across the border toward the rag-covered huts and tin-roof oil shanties in southern Iraq.

“The Rumaylah field is there,” Rashed says above the desert wind. “If Saddam sets fire to that reservoir, the enormity of the inferno is beyond the imagination.”

Rashed wrinkles his face at the prospect of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein igniting any portion of the 112 billion barrels of oil and 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas percolating beneath his soil, the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia. Although Hussein told the US television network CBS that he will not destroy Iraq’s energy wealth during any armed conflict with the almost 100,000 US and British troops now massed along the frontier, Rashed warns that “only an army of fools” would trust the vow.

“Saddam has done it before and will do it again,” Rashed cautions. “Do not believe his promises.”

War planners from the UK and senior Kuwait Oil executives on the Iraq-Kuwait border say they are focusing their attention on how to take control of the country’s oil wells before Hussein has time to issue the order to destroy them, as he did with Kuwait’s wells at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

Cluster bombs

For those on the front lines, Hussein’s promise is too hollow to be taken literally. The stakes are high. During the 1991 war Hussein strategically littered all roads to Kuwait’s burning wellheads with cluster bombs, land mines and booby traps. This time, senior military officers say they are expecting more complex defenses, including biological weapons and so-called dirty bombs that would contaminate the fields with radiation.

Along with the Rumaylah field, oil companies such as Russia’s OAO Lukoil, China’s CNPC-Norinco and France’s Total Fina Elf SA have earmarked billions of dollars to expand production at the nearby West Qurna, Majnun and Al-Ahdab fields. A senior British Army officer familiar with the classified coalition plan designed to prevent Hussein from torching these installations says everything possible must be done to prevent their destruction.

“The economic and environmental significance of Iraq’s oil fields is firmly understood,” says the officer, who must remain nameless for security reasons.“No matter what Saddam promises, there are no certainties about what he says and no guarantees that we can secure those wells in good order.”

Well fires

Riding into the blazing Ratqa fields 12 years ago with other Kuwait Oil executives aboard a U.S. Marine Corps fighting vehicle, Rashed spent more than six months defusing Iraqi cluster bombs placed to hamper recovery efforts. And he extinguished well fires that he says unleashed over 6 million barrels of burned oil into the sky for six months.

If Hussein puts the match to Rumaylah’s higher-pressure wells, Rashed says 10 million barrels daily will go up in smoke.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” he adds.

Deep in Kuwait’s southern desert, Faisal Al-Ayar, the chief executive of Kipco Holding Co., a privately held Kuwaiti financial, telecommunications and banking firm with interests in the region’s energy sector, puts his hand to his heart and asks God to prevent Hussein from unleashing another firestorm on the environment.

Wearing a traditional Arab headdress, the wind blowing his long silk robes around the fire at his tented encampment, Ayar says his company is prepared to head into Iraq alongside coalition forces.

Helicopters overhead

“Any change in Iraq will be good for the regional and global economy,” Ayar says over cups of pungently spiced coffee as US Army helicopter gunships fly overhead. “Kipco is ready to help create that change any way we can,” he explains. “We want to be the first company to go in.”

Back on the border, Rashed says the political and economic challenges of rebuilding the Iraqi oil sector are gargantuan.

“It’s not just whether Saddam destroys the wells,” Rashed explains. “Some of Iraq’s northern fields are controlled by the Kurds, who want their own state. The eastern fields are on the Iran border and their ownership for years has been in dispute. In each oil region there will be fighting among factions to control the resources.’’

Rashed, who played a major role in reconstructing Kuwait’s torched oil sector, says the cost of that job exceeded $100 billion, not including the $45 million spent by the US Army Corps of Engineers to mobilize and transport the outside contractors required to accomplish the task. “Saddam’s oil system is primitive and collapsing,” Rashed explains. “Rebuilding it will be much more expensive and time-consuming that it took here.”

Bribes

Rashed describes the potential environmental fallout and cost of rebuilding Rumaylah and its nearby sister fields as a “staggering” chore and “beyond any description of what we faced in Kuwait.” There, Hussein set ablaze 737 of the country’s 858 working wells and destroyed $33 billion of industrial infrastructure.

“Saddam had seven months to plant explosives in Kuwait; he’s had years to organize the destruction of Iraqi facilities,” explains Kuwait Oil field development manager Aisa Bou Yabes.

During the last Gulf War, Yabes remained in Kuwait as the leader of the Kuwait Oil underground of oil executives and engineers who risked their lives to hide classified corporate documents from Iraq’s Republican Guard troops. Along the way, they saved 22 wells from destruction by handing out American dollars and precious gems as bribes to the occupation forces.

Oil pressure

Yabes says pockets of crude that have not been pumped to the surface for some time are the most dangerous. “These reservoirs build up virgin oil pressure,” Yabes explains, stroking his bushy salt-and-pepper beard. “Explosions in the Iraqi fields have high potential. A great deal of pressure has built up.“

Yabes says it’s impossible to estimate the cost of any similar destruction in Iraq. ‘‘It would be a catastrophe of inconceivable horror,” Yabes says. “To save the fields, the military must do whatever it has to do as fast as possible and no matter the cost. The wealth Saddam is willing to incinerate into the sky is much more than anyone can imagine.”

In order to plug the chaos Hussein unleashed in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War, roustabouts battled wellhead temperatures that exceeded 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, expending 300,000 pounds of explosives and 11 million gallons of water a minute to secure the wellheads. As for the black clouds that billowed from the flames, scientists working with veteran oil firefighters like Richard Childree reckoned it would be safer to smoke 20 packs of cigarettes a day than to spend eight hours battling the blaze without protective gear.

‘Worst-case scenario’

“I left Kuwait in 1991 thinking it was a once-in-a lifetime event,” says Childree, the vice president of Cudd Well Control Inc.“Now I’m looking to be back,” he adds from his office in Houston, Texas. “The Iraqis play dirty defense.”

Adds Bill Mahler, the marketing manager of Wild Well Control Inc. in Spring, Texas, “I can put out an oil fire. But if he destroys the wells he destroys the cash flow the Iraqis need to rebuild their economy. I thought what Saddam did in Kuwait was a worst-case scenario, but now I’m not so sure.”

Childree and Mahler say their companies are primed to airlift extra firefighters and gear into the region to reinforce the men and equipment already scattered throughout Kuwait and, in some areas, encircled by Patriot anti-missile batteries. “The things Saddam could do to his wells are beyond normal comprehension,” hildree says.

Anthrax

Among the traps, US military intelligence officials say they are concerned Hussein might ring his oil fields with so-called silent land mines filled with anthrax spores. Perhaps more worrisome, Yabes says that during the 1991 Gulf War Iraqi military officers informed the Kuwait Oil underground that Hussein’s plan to blow Kuwait’s wells had been set in motion months before the fuse was lit.

“Soldiers going in to secure the wells will find each one ringed with sandbags to push the explosive force inward,” Yabes says. “There were electric ignition, primer cord and simple light-a-match fuse systems linked to thousands of pounds of explosive and under 24-hour patrol by the Republican Guard.Saddam used three-man explosive teams, each assigned to rig and destroy five wells.’’

As for the command to set the fields ablaze, Yabes says each team had instructions to blow their sectors the moment Iraqi troops retreated across the border. “The only way that order could be countermanded was for them to receive an instruction from Saddam, himself, that said otherwise.”

That order never came.

 

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