Oil-rich Iraq pays 200 million dollars a month to import gasoline, according to oil officials who believe easy savings can be made by increasing the country's refining capacity and ending smuggling.
As soon as he took up his post on May 8, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum called on workers to push production at Iraq's three main refineries.
"We have a plan to increase refining," Ulum said in a newspaper earlier this week. "We want to stop the imports."
Ironically, the country used to produce more than enough to meet its needs before the US-led invasion in March 2003, Dathar al-Khashab, manager of the flagship Dura refinery on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, said.
That amounted to 15 million litres (4 million gallons) a day.
But an estimated one million new cars on the road and thousands of new generators have pushed daily demand up to 23 million litres (around 6 million gallons), Khashab said, while production has plunged as insurgents sabotage crude oil pipelines.
"The real story is the increase in consumption," Khashab said. "Even if we operate at full capacity, we can't meet it."
US officials started importing gasoline in 2004 from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, among others, to deal with shortages which caused long lines at gas pumps around the country.
For nine months, the US paid for "humanitarian" imports of gasoline out of 18.4 billion dollars appropriated by Congress for reconstruction aid.
Iraq now pays for the imports from its crude oil sale profits.
But smuggling, not low production, is also a reason for shortages, an Iraqi oil ministry analyst said.
The regime of ousted leader Saddam Hussein "encouraged the smugglers, so they got experience that they're using now," according to the analyst, who declined to be named.
The Baghdad regime spent years attempting to evade an oil embargo imposed by the West in the wake of its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
"Smugglers take advantage of general lawlessness to send almost half of what's imported immediately back out of the country, he said.
"It became a vicious circle now. We import about nine million litres per day, and about three to four million litters immediately goes back out" as smugglers take advantage of heavily subsidized gasoline prices, he said.
"If we could control the borders, then we could satisfy ourselves with our own refinery products."
Smugglers can make up to 12,000 dollars per tanker truck as gasoline sells for about 2 cents per litre in Iraq, but for up to one dollar per litre in Jordan and Turkey.
Khashab disagreed that smuggling was the main problem, pointing out that the oil and interior ministries recently had caught some key smugglers.
In the meantime, Dura refinery has increased its production to about 90 percent of its capacity, Khashab said, up from 70 percent six months ago.
The oil ministry also closed Baiji refinery for a month recently, 200 kilometres (125 miles) to the north, to allow for work on increasing capacity.
"By hook or by crook, I'll increase it," Khashab said. "We're trying to increase our production any way we can."
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