The unexpectedly slow revival of this pillar of the Iraqi economy, which has been plagued by looting and sabotage, has helped keep oil prices hovering around $30 a barrel on world markets for weeks. The industry's difficulties may also derail some of the plans of the allied authority here, whose budget for the year assumes sizable oil revenues.

"Certainly for this year and most of next year, the vast majority will come from oil," L. Paul Bremer III, the American occupation administrator in Iraq, said of budget revenues at a news conference last week. "That is a fact of life we cannot get away from."

American officials said recently that Iraq's budget for the rest of 2003 would be $6 billion to $7 billion. Half or somewhat more — about $3.5 billion — would come from oil exports, they said. 

That is far below the $15 billion to $20 billion in annual Iraqi oil revenue that the Bush administration had projected before the war. 

At $20 a barrel — the price that the allies are using, despite the much higher average price of oil this year — Iraq would need to export about 800,000 barrels a day to deliver such revenues to the budget, said Raad Alkadiri, an expert on Iraqi oil and a director of PFC Energy, a Washington consulting group. 

The eight million barrels to be exported this month amounts to only 258,000 barrels a day. Before the war Iraq exported, legally and otherwise, about two million barrels a day.

For months, the Iraqi Oil Ministry, backed by the Americans, has predicted that oil production, and exports, would gradually improve. Late in June, Thamir Ghadhban, the ministry's interim chief executive, said that production would reach about 1.5 million barrels a day by mid-July. But Oil Ministry officials say that production now hovers between 900,000 and 950,000 barrels a day.

"Our superiors at the Oil Ministry said that we could export about 500,000 barrels a day in July," one oil industry official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "But we're not sure now. People are surprised. We thought we could do better than this."

Oil traders said they certainly believed that Iraq's oil industry would rebound quickly; near the end of the war, the price of oil slid into the mid-$20-a-barrel range. But it has climbed back as traders have come to understand that in the near term, Iraq cannot sustain robust production.

"The market seems to have resigned itself to a long wait," Thomas P. Bentz, senior energy analyst at BNP Paribas Commodity Futures in Manhattan, said. 

The uncertainty around Iraqi oil exports is sure to complicate any decision that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting States makes about oil output for the rest of the year when it meets in Vienna on July 31, said Walid Khadduri, editor of the Middle East Economic Survey.

"OPEC will be in the dark because the Iraqis are in the dark," Mr. Khadduri said.

At the last meeting of OPEC, in mid-June, members said they would monitor the market and rein in production that exceeds official quotas. They appear to be taking this step.

When a country has a regular flow of exports, it signs monthly contracts with buyers. The Iraqi oil is being sold through a tender instead, the industry official said, because Baghdad is unsure about its ability to maintain a steady flow. 

All the oil for export is from the Basra area in the south, which is producing 350,000 to 400,000 barrels a day, or about 20 percent of its prewar levels. Looting has stunted the output of the South Oil Company, and some major repairs may not be completed until the end of the year, American officials said in a recent issue of Platts, an oil industry journal.

About three million to four million barrels have been put in storage tanks in the south since the first tender for Iraqi oil was announced on June 12, said an official at the State Oil Marketing Organization, the ministry's export arm. The ministry is seeking to scrape together an equal amount this month, the official said. The oil will be shipped to foreign buyers from the Mina al-Bakr terminal in the Persian Gulf.

So far, there are no plans for exports from the Northern Oil Company, which manages production in the vast Kirkuk fields, although it is producing more than its counterpart in Basra. Adel Qazzaz, director general of Northern Oil, attributed the delay to leaks along the company's pipeline to an export terminal in Turkey.

But at least two explosions that were clearly sabotage damaged that pipeline last month. In Baghdad, Oil Ministry officials said that oil facilities in Iraq had been disrupted by more acts of sabotage, but they declined to elaborate.

"On the issue of sabotage, clearly that line of operation continues," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of land forces in Iraq, at a news conference last week.

"We as a coalition force have adapted some of our patrolling and some of our aerial reconnaissance and just our regular movements around the country to ensure that we are providing collateral protection to the critical infrastructure of the country."

The allies have begun to patrol pipelines and oil facilities by helicopter, an Oil Ministry spokesman said. The ministry and the Americans have also hired villagers and tribes- people who live near pipelines to keep an eye on them. But many Iraqi oil officials and engineers grumble that the response is too little, too late.

"The looting came as a surprise to the Americans," said Mr. Alkadiri, who recently traveled to Iraq. "And the Americans' inability to deal with it came as a surprise to the Iraqis."