One of my main concerns about the invasion of Iraq had to do with the fragility of the infrastructure of oil delivery -- pipelines and tankers -- and the enviro damage that would ensue when they were sabotaged.

They're burning stuff that is essentially fuel oil because they can't ship it out and the refineries can't operate til they get rid of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/world/middleeast/19enviro.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

June 19, 2006
Waste Oil Dumps Threaten Towns in Northern Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 18 — An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant sheep herders, but also contains Iraq's great northern refinery complex at Baiji.

The fires are no longer burning, but the suffocating plumes of smoke they created carried as far as 40 miles downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the dumping area described it as a kind of black swampland of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys. The clouds of smoke, said the engineer, Ayad Younis, "were so heavy that they obstructed breathing and visibility in the area and represent a serious environmental danger."

The area contains perhaps 30 villages on both sides of the Tigris River as well as a few shepherds with no fixed addresses, said Ahmed Mahmoud, an engineer who runs the assessment and monitoring department of the environmental office in Tikrit. Averaging a few hundred mud houses and perhaps 2,500 residents each, the villages have names like Zuwiya, Mesahag and Upper, Middle and Lower Halej.

Most of them depend on water from wells or the river, and about a dozen sit immediately between the river and the oozing bogs, which in places are no farther than 800 yards from the river's edge, Mr. Mahmoud said. He added that at least some of the black oil was already seeping into the river.

Exactly how far those pollutants will travel is unknown, but the Tigris passes through dozens of population centers from Baghdad to Basra. In the past, oil slicks created when insurgents struck oil pipelines in the Baiji area have traveled the entire length of the river.

As much as 40 percent of the petroleum processed at Iraq's damaged and outdated refineries pours forth as black oil, the heavy, viscous substance that used to be extensively exported to more efficient foreign operations for further refining. But the insurgency has stalled government-controlled exports by taking control of roadways and repeatedly hitting pipelines in the area, Iraqi and American officials have said.

So the backed-up black oil — known to the rest of the world as the lower grades of fuel oil — was sent along a short pipeline from Baiji and dumped in a mountainous area called Makhul.

A series of complaints handed up the Iraqi government chain were conveyed to oil industry officials, and as of last weekend the fires had at least temporarily stopped, but black oil was still being poured into the open valleys, according to Mr. Younis, who works in the province's Department of Environment and Health Safety.

The elected governor of the province that contains Baiji and Makhul said in an interview that he was outraged by what was happening there. "I call upon the United Nations and the United States administration to make haste in saving the people of Baiji and Tikrit from an environmental catastrophe," said the governor, Hamad Hmoud al-Qaisi.

But with few options for disposing of Baiji's current production of black oil and so much at stake for the Iraqi economy, it is unclear whether the government will even be able to hold the line on the burning at Makhul. A United States official in Baghdad, speaking anonymously according to official procedure, said earlier this month that Baiji was still turning out about 90,000 barrels a day of refined products, which would yield about 36,000 barrels a day of black oil.

Iraq's refineries will grind to a halt if the black oil does not go somewhere. "Unless we find a way of dealing with the fuel oil, our factories will not work," said Shamkhi H. Faraj, director of economics and marketing at the Iraqi Oil Ministry.

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