Smoke rises from an oil refinery in Baiji, Iraq, in October 2015. (Reuters)
With its refineries mostly destroyed and its tanker fleet under
constant attack, the Islamic State is increasingly turning to low-tech
alternatives for processing oil, a vital source of revenue for the
terrorist group, new satellite images reveal.
Aerial photos taken
near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul show scores of tiny, makeshift
refineries popping up in oil fields controlled by the Islamic State,
evidence that the jihadists are finding workarounds after losing much of
their oil infrastructure to airstrikes.
The micro-refineries —
sometimes called “teapots” — consist of little more than a ditch or pit
for storing crude and a portable metal furnace used to distill raw
petroleum into fuel. Thousands of such systems have long been in
operation in the Islamic State’s Syrian strongholds, but now they’re
sprouting up around the more established, though heavily damaged, Iraqi
oil fields, said Omar Lamrani, a senior analyst for Stratfor, a private, Texas-based intelligence company.
“In
a single oil field there can be hundreds of these makeshift
operations,” said Lamrani, citing aerial imagery showing a constellation
of tiny furnaces around a Mosul field that was mostly just sand a year
ago. “It’s not the ideal way to do it, so their revenue is going down.
But it still works.” The images
were provided to The Washington Post by Stratfor and AllSource
Analysis, a Colorado firm that specializes in geospatial research.
The
tiny refineries are partly offsetting huge losses in income resulting
from the disruption of traditional oil production in northern Iraqi
fields controlled by the Islamic State since mid-2014. After capturing
the facilities, the group’s leaders initially attempted to run them as
businesses, retaining enough workers to keep the refineries operating
and hauling the finished products by tanker truck to independent dealers
in Turkey, Syria and Iraq’s Kurdish provinces, U.S. officials say.
At
its peak, the Islamic State’s oil operations were netting an estimated
$50 million a month. But the group’s oil income has plummeted in recent
months, through a combination of poor management and a steady drumbeat
of airstrikes that have targeted refineries and storage depots as well
as tanker convoys.
The proliferation of micro-refineries is the
latest sign of strain in the group’s self-declared caliphate, which has
lost half its territorial holdings in Iraq since late 2014. At the same
time, the use of low-tech alternatives also reflects a certain
resilience by an organization that also depends on self-generated oil to
run its military operations and electric generators, Lamrani said.
Stratfor estimates that oil contributed about $20 million a month to the
Islamic State's coffers as recently as March, with much of the
petroleum coming from makeshift facilities.
There
are many drawbacks to the system. The small furnaces, which heat raw
petroleum to a high temperature and then capture and cool the vapors to
create gasoline, produce thick clouds of black smoke and leave pools of
toxic byproducts on the surface. But because they are small and
scattered, the "teapot" refineries are harder to destroy from the air.
And any that are destroyed can be easily and cheaply replaced, oil
industry experts say.
“This is very inefficient, dirty and
creates lots of waste,” said Paul Bommer, a professor of petroleum
engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. And yet, he said, “it
is a way to make small amounts of product at isolated locations, which I
suppose could make the sites harder to find.”
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