25 July 2005 As an Aug.15 deadline approaches for agreeing on a final draft of Iraq’s new constitution, Iraqi officials say the document should be ready for debate by a special committee next week, to be followed by the National Assembly. However, agreement remains elusive on how ownership and management of Iraq’s vast oil resources should be formulated in the draft constitution, a member of the constitutional drafting committee told…
Tag: Missan
Iraq Constitution Vague on Key Oil Issues
24 August 2005 Iraq’s new draft constitution, which is awaiting a final vote by the National Assembly, offers significant power to the country’s many regions in determining how to manage Iraq’s oil wealth. The draft copy of the constitution, however, remains vague on major issues regarding oil policy and future investments, opening the way to different interpretations and possibly disputes which could delay the opening up of Iraq to international…
Hussein Al-Shahristani
The Iraqi oil minister talks oil with Ruba Husari:
Q. You launched your first licensing round Jun. 30 with an ambitious schedule to award contracts by June 2009. In view of Iraq’s problems, is this timetable realistic?
HS: It is ambitious, but we are talking about producing fields, where production profiles and other data are already available, and most of the international companies that intend to bid for those fields have a lot of data, so the time required to familiarize themselves is much shorter than if we were talking about non-developed fields. We think one year is enough. We gave the companies six months to prepare their bids and we told them to start preparing from now. Iraq lost big investment opportunities in the last five years as a result of the security situation and political differences. We cannot afford to waste any more time, and we aim to complete this process within a year. We will also launch a second licensing round before the first one is completed. Once the data packages are out in September and while companies prepare their bids, which are due in March 2009, we will have time to prepare for the launch of the second round.