Kirkuk Oil Battle Heats Up; Oil Funds for Refugees

Posted by Ben Lando, Iraq Oil Report at 11:00 AM on November 30, 2007.

Iraq's Oil Ministry is accusing the Kurdistan region of preventing development of one of Iraq's oldest, largest and most controversial oil fields, another dispute in the battle over control of the country's vast reserves. While the rift has been public, the issue of the Kirkuk oil field project is starting to surface in conflicting accounts. …"We have an engineering procurement contract. When equipment arrived, we started working ourselves," Falah al-Khawaja, director general of the State Company for Oil Projects, an arm of the ministry, said on the sidelines of an oil conference in London. "They prevented us from continuing our work, which is actually against the law. "Khawaja wouldn't elaborate on who "they" actually are, adding: "I've been there. I know what's going on in Khurmala. The equipment started to arrive only seven months ago."

Read my whole story for United Press International HERE.

More on the KRG visit to the U.S.A.

U.S. reporters are on the ball on the visit by the KRG's number one oil man.

*Midway through a tour of Washington and Texas, Kurdish leaders defended their break with Baghdad on oil production, promising to double the number of foreign companies drilling in their territory by the middle of next year, Dave Michaels reports for The Dallas Morning News.

*And from The Washington Post's Steven Mufson:

Two top Kurdish leaders are a long way from the mountains of northern Iraq this week.

On Monday night, Omer Fattah Hussain was the toast of a dinner held at the 10,000-square-foot McLean mansion of Ed Rogers, a Reagan White House political director and current chairman of the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers. In an opulent living room just off an art-filled entryway with a curved double stairway, the deputy prime minister of the Iraqi Kurds' autonomous region mingled with such luminaries as former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and former White House press secretary Tony Snow.

Today, Hussain travels to Houston with Ashti Abdullah Hawrami, the Kurdish regional oil minister, to woo an even more important audience: U.S. oil companies.

*Cathy Landry for Platts reports Hawrami has a couple more production sharing contracts in pocket.
More Iraq Oil News

Lukoil, the private Russian major that claims rights to develop Iraq's largest oil fields, has reportedly restarted talks with the Iraq Oil Ministry, in Baghdad, the awkwardly named Noozz.com reports.

The Majnoon field, which Chevron and Total are salivating over, will double production soon, according to the Iraq Development Program's website.

Middle East private gas firm Dana Gas has opened a new office in the north of Iraq, Noozz via IDP reports.

The Ministry is planning a new refinery in Nasiriya, DPA reports.

Iraq income up on high oil prices, Alsumaria TV reports.

Iraq Oil for Displaced Too

A petition is being circulated online by some prominent folks, saying that if Iraq's oil reserves are to be shared with all Iraqis, the 4.5 million displaced Iraqis should be part of it.

The Iraq Press Roundup with UPI's Hiba Dawood.

The regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan is issuingbiometric identity cards to all its employees to improve security at government offices, UPI reports.

Tagged as: iraq, oil, kurdish autonomous zone

Ben Lando is an energy correspondent for UPI an proprietor of the Iraq Oil Report.