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…

KRG And The Oil & Gas Law

The draft oil and gas law has been with the Council of Representatives since 2007 and was followed later by the INOC draft law. There were several reasons behind the legislative stalemate, but the main one is the request of the Kurdish parliamentary block to postpone the debate on oil legislation until an accord is reached regarding the pending issues in the oil and gas law. The main pending issues…

Ashti Hawrami

The Kurdistan Regional Government’s minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, spoke to Ruba Husari in Erbil late July on the latest developments in Kurdistan’s upstream and downstream sector, the smuggling controversy, differences with Baghdad over crude exports and the fate of the federal hydrocarbon law. Q. What’s the status of the different contracts signed so far with the KRG and how is work progressing on the ground? A. We have…