Posted on 04/21/2015 4:52:44 AM PDT by thackney
Lifting sanctions against Iran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program won’t immediately flood the world with oil as some have feared, recently retired U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns said Monday.
His comments, made on the opening day of the five-day IHS Energy CERAWeek conference Monday, addressed the concerns that have rocked oil markets as diplomats met in Switzerland to hammer out the details of a deal to cut off Iran’s pathways to making a nuclear bomb.
News leaking out of the negotiations caused oil prices to swing wildly in the days leading up to the framework agreement that was reached in early April amid speculation that more Middle Eastern oil would soon come on the market at a time when the world has too much supply and not enough demand.
Although Iran’s oil output tumbled by about a million barrels per day after sanctions went into place in 2012, it could take a year or more for the country to return to those levels again, said Burns, who led the Obama administration’s secret talks in Iran that paved the way for a 2013 interim agreement called the Joint Plan of Action restricting Iran’s nuclear program.
“Moving upwards beyond those levels, in terms of oil production and oil exports in Iran, is going to require some quite substantial investment in infrastructure which has lacked that investment for a long time,” said Burns, now president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy thinktank.
The country’s natural gas production fared better under sanctions, with Iran showing a substantial boost in output, but further expansions would also require “substantial outside investment,” Burns said in a discussion about the implications of an Iranian nuclear deal.
While some have expressed concerns that the recently reached framework agreement gives a free pass to a country that has displayed a pattern of threatening behavior to the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East , Burns called the negotiations an “important step in the right direction” toward an important goal: constraining Iran’s nuclear abilities and setting up the most comprehensive monitoring system yet of the country’s nuclear program.
“We live in an imperfect world in which there are no perfect solutions,” he said. “The Iranians have developed the know-how regarding enrichment technology and … it’s not possible as a matter of simple reality to wish that away or dismantle it away or bomb it away.”
I’m so SICK of reading about this WORTHLESS country that couldn’t defeat Iraq in TEN years of war. It took us a few weeks. that puts thing in perspective. They are nothing and nobodies except that Obama and Jarrett makes them something. Destroy the reactors and forget they exist.
We have become an embarrassment!!! The greatest power in the history of the world BEGGING like little kids “please don’t build the bomb mister”
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