Signature Bonus

Mr. Jiyad raises interesting questions about the transformation of the signature Bonus into a debt instrument. It is indeed messy, and apparently, the situation is still evolving, with the reimbursable payment seemingly  being transformed into a (much) smaller outright grant. However, the fact that signature bonuses are higher in Angola than in Iraq may be due to any number of causes. Perhaps (as we do not know details of the…

Production Capacity Strategy

One of the pending issues that was talked about and questioned, and may be considered as a challenge, is the future level of Iraq’s production capacity. Conflicting statements have been issued recently by a number of governmental sources. No doubt the country has committed   itself to a major expansion program and it’s cooperating with reputable international oil companies. It’s well understood that those contracts require timely planning, not just as…

West Qurna, Rumaila & Water Injection (2)

1. The Mishrif reservoirs requires tighter specifications of water quality, our previous laboratory experiments which involved among many tests, flooding full cores at reservoir conditions, led to the conclusion that the size of suspended solids should be less than 5 microns as compared with 10 microns for the Main Pay in south and north Rumaila Fields. The reduction of particle size down to 5 microns could be achieved by using…

Iraq’s Strategy and Reserves Replacement

Reserves replacement is to be taken seriously from a strategic planning point of view. As the country has embarked on a substantial program to build up Iraq’s crude oil and gas production capacity in cooperation with international oil companies, the fifteen oil fields to be developed and produced in accordance with the twelve contracts contain some 100 billion barrels of proven reserves based on the reserves revision released by the…