Iraq To Start Drilling At Shared Field With Kuwait

Iraq will commence drilling for oil at a field shared with Kuwait although the lack of an agreement outlining investment in equally owned fields, according to sources. In the weeks before the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Baghdad blamed the nation of stealing billions of dollars worth of oil from its fields through horizontal drilling. Kuwait denied the charge.

"The oil minister visited Safwan oilfield and inaugurated the installment of many rigs, which are due to start drilling in a few days," oil ministry spokesman Asim Jihad said.

Several fields overlap the border, including the Rumaila South field and also the Safwan and Zubair fields.

During a visit to the joint border fields, Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani said that until an agreement is entered with Kuwait, Iraq will drill additional wells in the region, his spokesman said.

"We will start drilling more wells in the border field of Safwan to make the most of crude available to raise production and export rates," Jihad quoted Shahristani as saying.

Iraq has not signed any agreement setting out the technical and legal mechanisms to spend in oilfields shared by the two nations.

In the pipeline

Reading-based Foster Wheeler Energy has been awarded a contract by the South Oil Company for the basic engineering of oil export facilities that will supplement the Al-Basra terminal in Iraq.

The offshore facilities will include new single point mooring tanker loading buoys, together with oil pumping, metering and pipelines, to achieve an export capacity of 4.5 million barrels per day.

The Foster Wheeler contract value for this project was not disclosed and it will be included in the company’s first-quarter 2009 bookings.

Foster Wheeler will prepare a technical definition package, plans and schedules for full project implementation and invitation-to-bid documents for the supply and construction of the offshore export facilities.

‘We have been working with the South Oil Company and Iraq’s Ministry of Oil on the upgrading of these export facilities and we are very pleased to have been awarded this basic design contract,’ said Michael J Beaumont, chairman and chief executive officer of Foster Wheeler Energy.

Iraq Oil Minister to Meet Oil Firms in UK

Iraq's oil minister will meet energy firms bidding for long-term oil and gas service contracts in London next month to discuss details of the fields on offer as well as contract terms, the oil ministry said on Sunday.

"The oil minister will meet representatives from international oil companies in London on October 13 to offer all the information they need to develop the oil and gas fields announced in the first bidding round," ministry spokesman Asim Jihad said.

The 41 companies which pre-qualified to vie for the contracts have all been invited to the meeting with oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani.

To read the full story on iraqupdates.com