Years of patchwork engineering hinder industry’s revival

Nashi Ali chuckles as he describes the American contractors trying to help resuscitate Iraq’s battered oil industry. “They walk around asking, ‘Where are the schematic diagrams for this? How will we know how it all works?’” says Mr Ali, chief electrical engineer for North Oil Co’s Jambur North oil field. “I tell them, all the diagrams we need are right here,” he says, finger on his temple.

Ordered by Saddam Hussein to produce a million barrels of oil a day, with no excuses, Iraqi oil-field workers have relied for the past decade on homespun ingenuity rather than diagrams, jury-rigging pipeline bypasses, hand-patching leaky flow lines and crafting spare parts out of scrap metal. But the industry’s biggest virtue now could become one of its biggest handicaps, American advisers say the years of gunpoint engineering have created habits and attitudes that are slowing efforts to modernise operations at North Oil — one of the two sate-owned oil companies under the Hussein regime — where the newest equipment dates from the 1970s. “They have an unbelievable capacity to fix things with very limited resources. But it also means they don’t think outside the box” says Maj Joe Hanus of the US Army Corps of Engineers, who has spent two months advising the reconstruction process in the north. “Every time you want to do something, you have to ask around until you can find the one old guy who knows where all the pipes go,” adds Maj Hanus, who still is trying to locate a complete map of the area’s maze-like pipeline system. For the Iraqis, starved of spare parts or new technology after decades of under-investment and 12 years of sanctions, the homemade solutions that kept oil flowing are a source of pride locally and cause for adulation from Western analysts.

Their handiwork is constantly called upon these days. A mid-June sabotage attack on the Iraq-Turkey pipeline that carries exports was patched by welding a sleeve over the hole left by the explosion. The flow of export oil from the north was expected to resume in early July - until it was attacked again this week, again knocking it out of commission. Not far from the converted kindergarten where North Oil’s engineering department now has its headquarters is the largest of the company’s seven workshops. It was built in the early 1930s and still has the original equipment; the cranes and winches are of pre-World War II British manufacture, while the pipe lathes are a mishmash of Spanish, German, Czechoslovakian and Japanese gear. But it all still works, turning out pipe fittings, shafts and new fittings for pumps and valves. “The lesson we learned is that nothing is impossible,” says Ihsan Hussein, now head of the workshop and no relation to the former Iraqi leader. “Anything can be made, fixed or modified right here,” he adds as a 28-year workshop veteran approaches, showing off a pump part made of discarded steel. Despite a good working relationship, Maj Hanus says, his unit and the American contractors from Halliburton Co unit Kellog Brown and Root have butted heads with local engineers over how to get off flowing again quickly.

The mix of old and new ideas has created “a lot of difficulty,” says Rick a contractor for KBR working with the mechanical engineers, who declined to give his surname. “Sometimes you just have to figure out how they used to do something, and it may not be the optimal solution. But if it solves the immediate problem, that’s good enough for now,” he says. “You are not going to just yank these guys into the 21st century. It’s going to take time.” Meanwhile, Iraqi workers fear for their jobs. With Army engineers charting North Oil’s future alongside new management, says Ihsan Hussein, “we don’t really know what will happen to us.” Back at Jambur North field, Mr Ali shakes his head as he looks around the shattered control centre, where almost all the cable cabinets were torn from the walls, gutted by looters and left beyond repair. The first one back in operation was crucial: It controls the lighting systems needed to guard the site from further looters; actual operational systems will have to wait two more weeks. For that, KBR subcontractors are planning to replace all the old analog metres with new digital equipment and standardise the maze of electrical components. “All of the old stuff we could understand just fine,“ Mr Ali says. “But when they bring in new equipment and new technology, we’re going to need new courses. We’ll need to find a way to learn how to run it all again.”