IEA: oil supplies too tight for war

Options for Dealing with North Korea

by Ted Galen Carpenter Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and the author or editor of 14 books on international affairs, including Peace & Freedom: Foreign Policy for a Constitutional Republic. March 07,2003

A surge in world oil output last month has left producer countries with too little spare capacity to fully offset a wartime halt in supplies from Iraq, the International Energy Agency warned.

OUTPUT INCREASED 2.5 percent worldwide in February and oil inventories tightened in major importing nations, the agency said Wednesday. Fears of a U.S.-led attack on Iraq propelled prices to their highest levels since the 1991 Gulf War.

International oil markets are "running on empty" as war clouds gather again in the Persian Gulf, the agency said in its monthly oil market report.