IDC’s Success Story

Iraq Drilling Co (IDC) is back in force and seems on the way to turn itself into a success story by teaming up with the big ones. After the short setback following the failed joint venture with Mesopotamia Petroleum, it has finally found the magic formula to play the leading role in the gigantic drilling effort that will take place across the Iraqi oil fields over the next few years.

In the first drilling tender launched earlier this year for drilling in Rumaila oil field, IDC bid jointly with Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services provider and together they won a contract to drill 21 new wells and carry out workover jobs on 23 wells. IDC will supply three of its…

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al-Ghadban . bids . drilling . drilling tenders . Gharraf . Halliburton . IDC . Iraq drilling company . Majnoon . Mesopotamia Petroleum . Najmah . OEC . oil ministry . pipelines . pumping stations . Qayarah . rigs . Rumaila . Schlumberger . Scop. . service contracts . Shahristani . tank farm . Weatherford . wells . West Qurna . workover . Zubair The View from Baghdad

Watering the Oil Fields

Iraq is set to witness a few firsts when it comes to how oil fields have been and are being developed around the world. After all, at no time in the history of the industry has so many oil fields of this size been developed all at once in such a short time span. One of the major firsts will no doubt be the Common Seawater Supply Facility (CSSF) which will aim to process up to 15 million barrels per day of raw seawater from the Mideast Gulf in order to provide some 12 million b/d of treated water to be injected in fields in southern Iraq as they are developed. That makes it the biggest such project in the…

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common seawater supply facility . CSSF . Exxon . field development . Gharraf . Halfaya . Majnoon . Mideast Gulf . Missan . oil ministry . pipelines . Rumaila . seawater . service contracts . SOC . water injection . West Qurna . Zubair The View from Baghdad

Pioneer CNPC

Wasit Province – About 2,000 Chinese workers are about to descend on Al-Ahdab oil field next month to start work on the construction of the central production facility, engineer Ahmad Abdul Redha, the chief of Al-Ahdab section at North Oil Co (NOC) tells me during a tour of the fortress camp that CNPC’s subsidiary, Al-Waha Petroleum, built just 15 km to the west of Kut.

With five rigs on the field, Daqing Drilling, CNPC’s drilling subsidiary, has drilled six new wells and carried workovers on three – out of seven drilled in the 1980’s – since launching work on Al-Ahdab in January 2009. By the end of the year, it’s expected to double the number of rigs in order to achieve…

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1997 . 1st bid round . 2008 . 2nd bid round . Al-Ahdab . Al-Waha . bids . CNPC . Daqing drilling . drilling . export . Kut . licensing rounds . NOC . Nouri al-Maliki . oil ministry . plateau . production . PSA . rigs . service contract . Shahristani . Wasit . Zubaidiya The View from Baghdad

Electricity Woes

Baghdad – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while standing by his resigning minister of electricity Karim Wahid, blamed the latter for raising people’s expectations and promising quick solutions to the electricity problems. The truth is, he said, the situation will not improve until the projects to build new power plants and install turbines contracted from GE and Siemens are done within two years. But would they?

Maliki is committing the same mistake of making promises neither he nor any other prime minister who will succeed him can realistically deliver on. The fact is Iraq does not currently have the means to finance the dozen or so power plants planned nor does it have the gas feedstock ready to supply them.

Political bickering…

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associated gas . electricity . gas . gas fields . GE . karim wahid . non-associated gas . oil ministry . power generation . power plants . Shell . Siemens The View from Baghdad