MOTORISTS hoping to fill their tanks in Kirkuk must join queues hundreds of cars long and prepare for a 20-hour wait before reaching the pumps.

Unlike the rest of their Iraqi compatriots they suffer the additional frustration of knowing that they are sitting on one of the greatest lakes of oil on Earth.

A debilitating combination of insurgent attacks, woefully decrepit infrastructure and government incompetence means that their oil industry is effectively moribund.

Instead of booming as a new Kuwait, which the city expected on Saddam’s fall in 2003, residents endure grinding poverty.

Pumping continues from Iraq’s second-biggest oilfield, but most crude is stored in tanks, not refined into petrol.

The petroleum industry in northern Iraq is in such dire straits that almost nothing is sold overseas. With no tax revenue the Iraqi Government has no other real source of income.

Southern Iraq is doing much better. An even bigger oilfield lies close to Kuwait and insurgent attacks in the south are less of a problem.

But in Kirkuk, the city’s very lifeblood has slowed to a trickle. The ugly city north of Baghdad lies on an ethnic faultline between Kurds and Arabs and is coveted by both for the fabulous wealth that lies underground. In the flat, featureless lands outside the city, black oil bubbles up in fields and ponds.

The city stinks of oil, even though there is so little fuel to put in car tanks. Millions of dollars in natural gas are burnt off in great sheets of orange flame because there is no capacity for storing or selling it, and rusty derricks, pipelines and storage tanks built by the British in the 1940s dot the landscape. There is little sign of improvement.

Many locals are bemused. “The people of Kirkuk say we are living on a sea of oil,” said Baher Barzingi, 35, a manager with the state-owned North Oil Company. “Yet we have no petrol, no paraffin, no propane.”

Mr Barzingi, a Kurd who helps to train the 3,600-strong Oil Protection Force set up by the US Army, blames repeated insurgent attacks for crippling any hope of quickly getting the petrodollars flowing again.

“We need oil to feed our families and for the future of our country,” he said. He also blamed the Oil Ministry and the Government in Baghdad for doing little to help his company to get back on its feet.

The oldest oil workers remember the British oil companies who founded Kirkuk’s oil industry with great fondness, he said, especially when they contrast those happy times with the current chaos.

The force has lost 20 of its men to insurgent attacks, one of which in February caused $50 million in damage to a plant which will be shut for at least a year. Nobody is sure who will pay for the repairs.

Gesturing at another oil plant across from his office, with its ancient tanks, stinking pools of oil, and pipes leaking steam, Mr Barzingi admitted that his job was a dangerous one. “They fired a Katyusha rocket last week, which missed. But if it hit a propane tank we would all have been burned to death, or suffocated by the gas.”

The perimeter was guarded by Ahmad Jaf, a Kurd and former peshmerga fighter who had sewn his Oil Protection Force badge on upside-down, and complained about lack of air-conditioning in his guard hut during the summer.

Security has only recently been handed over to Iraqis by the US military. Until a few months ago an artillery unit from the 101st Airborne had been patrolling pipelines which are vulnerable to rocket- propelled grenades.

Kirkuk’s oil industry cannot get going again until insurgent attacks reduce, but the insurgency is not expected to wane until the economy and job prospects improve. Some Western companies are showing an interest in investing but the security and infrastructure problems are daunting. Doubts over the shaky political set-up may be equally problematic for companies who want to be confident about legal agreements for billion-dollar investments.

TRAPPED RICHES

Before the US invasion, Kirkuk produced 700,000 barrels of oil a day

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