6 May 2003 With the weekend announcement of the first two names for an advisory board, US plans for oversight of Iraq’s oil industry appear to be taking shape. But questions are being asked as to why the rest of the board is taking so long to firm up, and what this might mean for Washington’s ability — or desire — to shape Iraqi oil policy. Some observers say that…
Tag: Shell
Oil Board Firms Up in Iraq; Somo Shattered
1 May 2003 US plans to set up an advisory board to oversee Iraq’s oil sector are taking shape. Fadhil Othman, a retired Iraqi oil marketing official now living in Turkey, is understood to have accepted Washington’s request that he serve as deputy head of the oil advisory board, a non-executive body. In view of Othman’s past experience as head of Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization (Somo), he “could be…
Big Fish
14 July 2000 Preparing for the day when UN sanctions are finally lifted, Iraq went touting its oil wares to an international audience in Paris last week. The audience – which included supergiants Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco, and Total Fina Elf, as well as a host of slightly smaller fry – also got to hear about some ambitious post-sanctions marketing plans, including moves to recapture more of the…
Hussein Al-Shahristani
The Iraqi oil minister talks oil with Ruba Husari:
Q. You launched your first licensing round Jun. 30 with an ambitious schedule to award contracts by June 2009. In view of Iraq’s problems, is this timetable realistic?
HS: It is ambitious, but we are talking about producing fields, where production profiles and other data are already available, and most of the international companies that intend to bid for those fields have a lot of data, so the time required to familiarize themselves is much shorter than if we were talking about non-developed fields. We think one year is enough. We gave the companies six months to prepare their bids and we told them to start preparing from now. Iraq lost big investment opportunities in the last five years as a result of the security situation and political differences. We cannot afford to waste any more time, and we aim to complete this process within a year. We will also launch a second licensing round before the first one is completed. Once the data packages are out in September and while companies prepare their bids, which are due in March 2009, we will have time to prepare for the launch of the second round.