2 May 2003
A team from US Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) on Thursday started assessment work at Iraq’s northern oil fields, as part of a contract the company holds with the US military, a KBR official told International Oil Daily on the scene.
“We are looking at various units and assessing oil and gas production facilities in coordination with [Iraq’s] North Oil Co. (NOC) management,” Rick Hopper, a senior human resource manager at KBR said, following a meeting with NOC’s operations and engineering directors at the company’s temporary headquarters in the town of Baba, in the Kirkuk oil-field complex.
Earlier reports compiled by NOC highlight damage to important field and pipeline facilities from both bombing and looting, but also suggest that the main export pipeline through Turkey could restart operations at levels similar to before the war.
Under its contract with the US Defense Department, known as Logcap-3, KBR is providing logistics to the US military for its operations in Kuwait and Iraq. A KBR team involving close to 100 people has been working in Iraq’s southern oil fields in the past two weeks, preparing the same type of assessment. The 10-member team that has just started work in Kirkuk includes engineers, discipline managers, and plant operation managers.
“Our job is to prepare recommendations on the damage in the facilities and the requirements to bring them back to prewar operations,” Hopper said.
KBR personnel also started issuing new badges for NOC employees to grant them access to facilities, which are currently under US military control.
“It’s just an additional security since we have US Army here at the facilities,” Hopper said.
A number of KBR officials on Thursday also flew to the 290,000 barrel-per-day Baiji refinery for a field assessment there, accompanied by Lt. Col. Benjamin Schrader of the US Army Corps of Engineers, who is in charge of supervising crude oil production in northern Iraq. The refinery could be brought back into operations today if problems with electricity supply are sorted out.
In preparation, KBR engineers visited warehouses at Kirkuk and Baba on Wednesday, and started surveying processing plants, pumping stations, gas compression stations, and pipelines across the northern fields.
“They were interested in details on the oil and gas fields, their production capacities, reservoirs, depth, and numbers, as well as their locations,” an NOC official said after the meeting.
According to Hopper, KBR will carry out assessment work, but does not have a contract to start reconstruction and repairs at the fields. “That contract will be open for bidding and we might get it or we might not,” he said.
The KBR team will study two kinds of damage at the northern oil production facilities since the start of the US war on Iraq in March: bombing and looting.
According to an NOC survey, bombing or other military damage affects the K3 pumping station at Haditha in western Iraq — which was heavily bombarded and destroyed in the first week of April, leaving 12 dead among NOC staff — and a number of pipelines linking the eastern and western banks of the Tigris River at the Fatha bridge, north of Baiji. The system of 16 pipelines that used to carry LPG, fuel gas, crude oil, and products collapsed and fell into the river when the US forces bombed several bridges in the area to isolate Tikrit, the hometown of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The NOC report says the second type of damage — ransacking and looting after the collapse of the Baath regime — affected the IT-1 pumping station on the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, mainly concerning control panels, sensors, and signal transmitters. Earlier reports of a fire on the pipeline near IT-1 proved to involve only burning fuel. The IT-1 station, located 15 kilometers west of Baba, can be operated manually at this stage.
The IT-2 pumping station, located 86 km from IT-1 on the same pipeline, has been completely looted and destroyed, according to the NOC report. Repairs at the station had been under way in recent years, after it was bombed in the 1991 Gulf War.
The status of another main pumping station on the parallel pipeline to Ceyhan, IT-1A , 120 km from IT-1, is unknown at this stage. The US military has been based near the facility for the last three weeks, and no report was available from the area.
IT-2A — the fourth and last pumping station on the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in Iraqi territory, which lies 83 km from IT-1 — is thought to be secure and intact, as is the measuring station at Khabur near the border with Turkey.
“If IT-1A is confirmed to be intact and operational, then the export line will be operational almost in the same way as before the war,” NOC’s deputy director general, Adel Qazaz, told International Oil Daily on Thursday.
Three gas compression stations — AB3 in Baba, AP2 nearby, and AP7 in North Jambur — have been ransacked with their fittings looted, as has a gas-oil separation plant in North Jambur.
Three gas-oil separation stations and three gas compression stations at the Bai Hassan field, as well as three other gas-oil separation plants and a wet crude treatment facility at the Avanah dome of the Kirkuk field, remain in the hands of Kurdish militia, despite calls by the US military to leave the area and return to Iraqi Kurdistan. Their state is not known.
Facilities at the Ajeel (formerly Saddam) field, 80 km southwest of Kirkuk, have been looted. NOC has not yet been able to visit the Khabbaz field, 20 km from Baba.
By Ruba Husari, Kirkuk
(Published in International Oil Daily May 2, 2003)