The semi-autonomous government in northern Iraq will offer 40 oil and natural gas blocks for exploration as part of plans to increase daily output to one million barrels in the next five years.
The Kurdish regional government plans to organize conferences in London, Houston and Irbil, Iraq, to clarify the process, Ashti Hawrami, the regional minister for natural resources, said in a statement. Its Parliament must first ratify a new energy law, including a framework for oil production sharing agreements.
Iraq has been unable to pass a federal energy law because of regional disagreements over sharing oil export revenue and the role of the Iraqi National Oil in managing national oil resources.
Iraq has an estimated 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third-largest in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Iran, according to BP.
“Last week an agreement was reached with Baghdad on the draft revenue sharing law, and secondly we have now resumed our discussions on the INOC and we are confident that this will be agreed on soon," Hawrami said.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish leaders have pursued an independent energy policy and has awarded DNO, a Norwegian oil company, an exploration contract and the company, based in Oslo, started drilling in northern Iraq in November 2005.As the rest of Iraq has plunged into a downward spiral, the Kurdish zone has had relative political stability and limited violence, in part owing to its sectarian and political homogeneity.
(Bloomberg, Turkish Daily News))