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The invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain has trebled the price of oil, costing the world a staggering US$6 trillion in higher energy prices alone, an industry expert has claimed.
Oil economist Mamdouh Salameh, who advises the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, said the price of oil would now be no more than US$40 a barrel, less than a third of the record US$135 a barrel reached last week, had it not been for the Iraq war.
Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq's oil, said it is the only one of the world's biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow.
Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day but this had now fallen to just two million barrels.
Salameh said Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the Gulf war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions."This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said.
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