Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even before the auction, analysts warned that Iraq's plans for attracting the investment necessary to crank up its output were overly optimistic. Iraq plans to retain ownership of its oil, but make long-term agreements with foreign companies to run the operations. But Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani demanded that oil companies lower their profit expectations, offering to pay them $2 for every barrel pumped in Iraq rather than the $4-a-barrel rate sought by oil executives. Chevron, which had negotiated for a year to develop Iraq's second-biggest field, West Qurna, pulled out of the deal...
...were put off by the prices demanded by the Iraqi government, and continuing concerns over the security situation in the country. And their caution has dealt a blow to Baghdad's efforts to raise billions of dollars desperately needed to rebuild. (Watch a video about the gas shortage in Iraq...
...Iraq remains enormously tantalizing for Big Oil, whose prospects for tapping huge new fields around the world are shrinking. The country's 115 billion barrels in proven reserves, most of it untapped, make it perhaps the last major oil territory yet to be spoken for. Engineers recently estimated that there may even be a further 150 billion barrels underground that have not yet been surveyed, much of it in the vast Western Desert. If true, Iraq could one day potentially match Saudi Arabia, whose output of 9.6 million barrels a day makes it the world's largest producer. Iraq currently...
...Iraq's industry has gone to seed in the decades of war and sanctions, as well as the expulsion of foreign oil companies by Saddam Hussein in 1972. But its potential remains massive, especially when compared with the dwindling reserves of the North Sea, the fact that most Middle Eastern fields are already being pumped, and that new deposits elsewhere offshore and in the Arctic are remote and expensive to develop...
...tempting for companies to miss having a foothold in Iraq," says Tariq Shafiq, director of the London oil consultancy PetroLog & Associates, and a previous executive director of Iraq's National Oil Company who helped to draft Iraq's new national oil law after the US invasion in 2003. "Where else would any company go today to have access to a field that produces two million barrels per day? There is none...