Iraq to Lobby Oil Majors for Investment

Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani said that he would launch wide-ranging contacts with international oil companies to boost investment in the sector. Iraq produced 2.1 million barrels of oil per day in April and exported 1.6 million which are below the levels recorded just before the US-led invasion of 2003.

"We will start contacts with the largest oil companies in the world who want to come in and work in Iraq and bring their technology and capital and sign, with our conditions, contracts to realize greater benefits for the Iraq people," the minister said. “Iraq’s God-given natural resources are huge and, if we can use and develop them properly, could put Iraq on the level of the richest countries in terms of income.  They say Iraq has the second largest reserves in the world, but I think Iraq is really the first because there has been no exploration or investment for all these years."

Iraq has more than 112 billion barrels of proven reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia, but potential reserves could be double that given the lack of exploration in recent decades.  Modern exploration techniques that have emerged in the past two decades, such as 2-D and 3-D seismic imaging, have never been used in Iraq.  Foreign investment in the oil industry has long been viewed with suspicion in Iraq because of the dominance of Arab nationalist ideology.  But the ravages sustained by its oil infrastructure have forced a change of heart.

"There is a need to put in place laws for oil and gas that set up a framework for international cooperation and develop the Iraqi capacity," Shahristani said.  "These resources cannot be developed through local efforts alone because we have neither the means not the expertise.  There have been a lot of developments in oil technology over the past two decades."