Word: oils
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...Fresh from a trip to Baghdad, Yves-Louis Darricarrère, who heads global exploration and production for the French energy giant Total, told TIME in early November that oil executives all feared being left out of the rush. "Iraq is extremely important for the industry and for world supply," he said. Even though Total dropped its bid in June for one of Iraq's fields, it is now considering several others on offer in a second round of bids, which Iraq's government has scheduled for mid-December; Iraqi oil officials say they expect about 45 companies to compete...
...being there won't be easy, either, due to daunting technical and other challenges. Iraq's oil industry has limped along for years on creaking old equipment, patchwork pipeline networks and decayed, rusted port facilities; Saddam-era sanctions largely prevented the industry from upgrading to state-of-the-art equipment. The country produces just 2.5 million barrels a day, down from 2.8 million barrels before the U.S. invasion and a sharp drop from its high of 3.7 million barrels in 1979, when Saddam boosted production to finance his calamitous war with neighboring Iran. A government adviser recently told Britain...
...While stability is returning, this relative peace is fragile. Iraqi officials and oil executives have rushed to sign contracts before national elections scheduled for January, since no one knows whether the current government will remain in power. Shahrastani is under fire from opposition politicians, who are complaining of widespread corruption and mismanagement in his ministry. In addition, oil contracts signed during the past five years with the Kurdistan Regional Government, whose three semiautonomous Iraqi provinces until recently exported about 100,000 barrels of oil a day, have been declared illegal by Baghdad, forcing Kurdish leaders to halt exports in October...
...Indeed, battles over how to carve up Iraq's oil revenues between the country's bitterly divided ethnic groups have stopped parliament from signing a national hydrocarbon law originally drafted in 2006. After previously insisting that they would not do business in Iraq without a legal framework governing central issues such as revenue-sharing, oil executives now are resigned to the fact that it may be years before a law is forthcoming...
...Neither companies nor government officials want to wait any longer to kick-start production. The Iraqi people are impatient for economic relief, and since more than 90% of Iraq's budget comes from oil revenues, nothing seems to offer more hope than the arrival of Big Oil. "We still have a long way to go to build the country," says Ahmeh Jasim, 56, a real estate agent in Baghdad. "Without these companies it is very hard to have a proper oil sector." For most Iraqis, the drilling cannot begin soon enough...