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Russia Expands Its Influence In Major Iraqi Oil Fields Given the U.S.’s broad scaling-down of its on-the-ground operations in the Middle East over the past five years, a specific function of which is ExxonMobil’s intention to sell its stake in Iraq’s supergiant West Qurna 1 oil field, China and Russia have been busy in occupying the spaces left by the U.S., as OilPrice.com has been highlighting since the process began. Just a few days ago, Washington appeared finally to have caught up to what has been going on, with the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Dana Stroul, saying: “It’s… clear that certain countries and partners would want to hedge and test what more they might be able to get from the United States by testing the waters of deeper cooperation with the Chinese or the Russians, particularly in the security and military space.”
Recent news reports were replete with Iraq declaring its willingness to invest $15 billion into new gas-focused projects that could reduce its reliance on one of Baghdad’s long-standing problems, its gas imports. Baghdad has committed to an ambitious timeline of reaching self-sufficiency by 2024-2025, with several large-scale projects being developed simultaneously. The announced gas-boosting drive will encompass Total spearheading the revived $7 billion Common Seawater Supply Project (injecting desalinated water into Basrah fields and processing the freed-up gas), Sinopec developing the 4.5 TCf Mansuriyah gas field and another, yet unnamed, investor taking up the 5.6 TCf Akkas gas field. Concurrently to Iraq pushing forward with domestic gas production, Baghdad has also announced that it intends to revisit a long-forgotten pipeline project.
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Could Iraq Really Become OPEC’s Largest Oil Producer? By Simon Watkins - Apr 21, 2021, 7:00 PM CDT
Iraq’s Oil Minister, Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar, announced last week that the country plans to increase its oil production capacity to 8 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2029, compared to current production of around 3.8 million bpd that factors in OPEC-mandated cuts.
Based on its vast oil resources there is no insurmountable reason why this output level should not be attained by that time or indeed even the 9 million bpd or 11 million bpd that were posited by the International Energy Agency in its 2012 production scenario analysis for Iraq. Even the lower of these two figures would allow Iraq to overtake Saudi Arabia as the number one oil producer in the Middle East, with the Kingdom producing just 8.17 million bpd on average from 1973 to this year. To reach these new output goals, Iraq announced last week initiatives including boosting the production from t
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Iraq Moves To Exploit Its Massive Natural Gas Reserves By Simon Watkins - Apr 05, 2021, 7:00 PM CDT
Official estimates are that Iraq’s proven reserves of conventional natural gas amount to at least 3.5 trillion cubic meters (tcm), or about 1.5 percent of the world’s total, placing Iraq 13th among global reserve-holders, with around three-quarters of this figure comprising associated gas that is found in the same reservoirs as oil. The International Energy Agency, though, estimates that ultimately recoverable resources will be considerably larger, at 8.0 tcm, of which around 30 percent is thought to be in the form of non-associated gas. Despite these huge potential gas resources, Iraq has made little substantial progress over the years on developing this potential either for associated or non-associated gas, mainly flaring the former and overlooking the latter. Last week, though, a heads-of-agreement deal was announced with French oil and gas giant, T