As you probably already know, Iraq is the country with the third largest oil reserve in the world, following Arab Saudi and Iran.
Iraq has eleven oil fields with a total reserve of 115 billion barrels of oil. The production capacity of these fields is of 2.5 million barrels a day. However, for several reasons, such as sabotage acts negatively impacting production in the northern part of the country and technical difficulties in some areas, actual production is only 2 million barrels on a bad day.
Oil production is heavily concentrated in two provinces, Basra and Kirkuk. Other oil fields are located in Mesan, Salaheddin, Mosul, Baghdad and Diala. An exciting fact about the Iraqi oil reserves is that there are also some discovered but undeveloped fields spread across the countries in most provinces, except for Anbar, Babel, Diwaniya and Dahouk. These fields could ensure the future of the oil industry for short to medium term. With the addition of these fields, capacity could reach 5.5 to 6 barrels a day.
Up until recently, Iraq’s oil fields used to be managed centrally by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil. However, with the new Constitution, these fields are now under the management of Iraq’s Federal Government. Under previous legislation, 14 state owned companies were responsible for oil drilling, oil exploration and oil production. The Ministry of Oil’s current strategy is to bring foreign investors to the country’s oil exploration and drilling activities in order to increase production beyond 2.5 million barrels a day.
In August 2008, Iraq signed the first major post-war deal with an international investor – China National Petroleum Corporation. This was actually a revised prewar agreement for CNPC to work on the development of the Ahdab field. The project had been interrupted in 2003 when the war in Iraq started. The Chinese oil company started work in March and continued the project despite security problems and farmers protests for damages to their property. (article continued in next weeks DrDinar blog post)
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by Darren Chabluk for http://DrDinar.com/blog
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