affairs, ambassador carlos pascual and of course deputy secretary of the department of energy, dan poneman so without further ado i will let ambassador pascual take the mic. >> good afternoon. it's a pleasure to see you and our behalf of the state department and the department of energy let me judy hsu to the joint quiddity committee on energy. is reflective of the relationship between the united states in iraq and how it has evolved and how we have established mechanisms to be able to work on issues that matter critical for both countries and energy is obviously one of those. it's fundamental to the rising economic future and fundamental to the ability to generate power for its own people and fundamental to its ability to supply international markets and in that context a direct interest to the united states. we have been working together on how to support iraq's efforts to increase its oil production and indeed iraq's effort has reached a level of about 3 million barrels a day in production. last year the average was about 2.7 million barrels a day in the year before that it was about 2.