A flame rises from a tower at Majnoon oilfield in Iraq’s southern province of Basra. The production re-start at one of Iraq’s major fields could help boost the Opec member’s exports towards the 2.9mn bpd average projected in the budget, making up for a cut by the country’s autonomous north.
Reuters/Baghdad
Royal Dutch Shell has allocated more than $1bn to develop Iraq’s Majnoon oilfield in 2013, the head of the joint management committee for the field said yesterday.
“The figure for the budget will exceed $1bn,” said Mehdi Badi.
The country’s oil minister Abdul Kareem Luaiby earlier said the oil major would resume operations at the field on May 1, with initial production of 100,000 bpd.
The production re-start at one of Iraq’s major fields could help boost the Opec member’s exports towards the 2.9mn bpd average projected in the budget, making up for a cut by the country’s autonomous north.
Iraq exported an average 2.538mn bpd in February, Luaiby said, up from 2.359mn the previous month.
“The significant factor which affected exports was the weather... but we hope, these months... we will compensate the lost amounts of the first season,” he said.
Majnoon was shut down in June for maintenance and to bring new production facilities online.
“Majnoon is planned to start producing on May 1. The production average will be 100,000 bpd to begin with and speedily rise to 200,000 bpd,” Luaiby said.
At their peak, oil exports from Iraq were above 2.6mn bpd, but last December its Kurdistan region stopped shipping crude because of a row with the central government over payments to oil companies operating in the region.
In recent years, the Kurds have signed deals on their own terms with the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp and Russia’s Gazprom Neft, riling Baghdad, which rejects the contracts as illegal.
Iraq has the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and is targeting exports of 6mn bpd by 2017.