6 November 2006 Three-and-a-half years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, some companies that had high hopes of business opportunities are shutting up shop after suffering heavy losses. US engineering giant Bechtel, which carried out $2.3 billion of work for the US in Iraq since April 2003, said last week that it was leaving the war-torn country after a spate of violence that killed 52 workers. Bechtel…
Tag: Somo
Two Years On, Iraq Output Still Struggling
9 March 2005 Almost two years after the US-led war ousted the Baath regime, Iraq is still struggling to meet prewar production levels at its dilapidated oil fields. Iraq’s southern oil fields, which accounted for the majority of prewar production of 2.8 million barrels per day, are currently managing just 1.85 million b/d — and even this rate is causing great distress to reservoirs, Iraq’s interim Oil Minister Thamer al-Ghadban…
Chalabi Named Acting Oil Minister in Iraq
29 April 2005 Three months after Iraqis voted in national elections, the first Shiite-led government in Iraq’s modern history has won the support of the elected National Assembly. However, protracted negotiations among political factions and differences within the biggest Shiite bloc mean that the positions of two deputy premiers and five ministers, including the oil portfolio, have yet to be filled. In a sign of the difficult horse-trading since the…
Bahr Al-Uloum Poised For Iraq Oil Job
6 May 2005 Former Iraqi oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum is set to make a comeback as the next oil minister, barring any last-minute hitches, after beating Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister and acting oil minister, as the candidate backed by a Shiite party. The Shiite Al-Fadhila Party, considered close to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was allocated the oil job in the ethnic carve-up of portfolios in Iraq’s new…