Word: field
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...foreign oil companies in a big way. Petroleum experts believe the war-torn country is underexplored and could potentially rival Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. And so the biggest names in the industry will put in bids for 20-year contracts on six of Iraq's largest oil fields and two of its largest gas fields, with the Iraqi Oil Ministry scheduled to announce the winning bidders on June 29 and 30. In the running are Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP as well as smaller Chinese, Russian and other state companies. Winners will have a 75% stake in the project...
...winners have a cautionary tale to consider. The first foreign firm awarded a post-Saddam Hussein contract was the Chinese National Petroleum Corp. Oil began to flow six months after CNPC began work on the Ahdad field, located 90 miles south of Baghdad in Wasit province. But it involved learning to work with locals - with the community relations continuing to be volatile. (See a video of Iraq's domestic oil supply problems...
Politicians back up the complaints. Says Ali Belo, chairman of the oil and gas committee of the Iraqi parliament: "Work on the field is negatively affecting their land and homes as well as the environment. The company has to either satisfy the residents by offering them jobs in, specially, guarding the facility and things like that, or expect that they won't be able to work safely...
...Ahmad Abd al-Rida al-Asadi, the head of the Ahdab field project for the North Oil Co., the Iraqi state firm in charge, calls Wasit province "very quiet." But he wants the Iraqi government to "send additional security forces because this project is very important for the Iraqi people and all eyes fall on this project because there is a foreign company for the first time working inside Iraq...
...Bigger changes are expected to come in five years, when the field is likely to be filled with new candidates and not figures from the New Order, as Suharto's regime was called. "All of the presidential candidates have been in office, so we know who they are," says Sandra Hamid, who handles governance issues at the Asia Foundation. "It is hard to know what they could tell people that will change their minds." (Watch a video about a destructive mud volcano in Indonesia...