Hydrocarbon Law Revisited

The year 2011 might turn out to be the year of Iraq’s hydrocarbon law, as this much awaited legislation could finally find its way to parliament, after the new council of ministers signs off on it. This doesn’t mean that the new law will cruise through without controversy. If anything, the discussions at the CWC Iraq Petroleum conference in London last week revealed the two sides are still at odds…

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…