14 March 2008 After struggling for five years to restore crude oil production to prewar levels, Baghdad is taking a pragmatic look at ways to involve international oil companies in developing its resources, sidestepping an internal debate over whether production sharing agreements (PSA) — the model preferred by Big Oil — are suited to Iraq. While discussions are ongoing with international oil companies, and between the Iraqi oil ministry and…
Tag: TSC
Iraq Courts Four Majors for Technical Deals
6 December 2007 Four majors met with Iraqi oil ministry officials in Amman last week to initiate talks on the first commercial technical support contracts to be awarded since the US-led invasion over four years ago, Iraqi and industry sources told International Oil Daily Wednesday. The ministry is aiming to raise output by 500,000 barrels per day over the next two years. The talks with BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and…
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.