Russian state oil producer OAO Gazprom Neft (SIBN.RS) will start first production from Iraq's Badra oil field at 60,000 barrels a day in March, the country's oil minister said in a statement Thursday.
Abdul Kareem Luaiby also said that production from Badra is expected to reach 170,000 barrels a day by 2017, according to a development plan agreed with the Iraqi government.
The Gazprom consortium, which includes South Korea's Gas Corp. (036460.SE), Turkish Petroleum Corp., or TPAO, and Malaysia's Petronas, signed a contract with Baghdad to develop the green field in January 2009.
Earlier this year, Gazprom and its partners awarded an $879 million contract to South Korea's Samsung Group (SSN.YY) to design and build phase two of a central processing facility for oil production in the field.
Badra's reserves are estimated to be around 3 billion barrels of oil.
Iraq signed a series of service contracts with major oil companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB.LN), Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Total (TOT), BP PLC (BP), and Eni SpA (E), at the end of 2009 to develop its oil fields.
Earlier this month Shell starts first production from the supergiant Majnoon oil field at around 175,000 barrels a day.
Luaiby said that Iraq is targeting oil production of 3.5 million barrels a day by the end of this year, up from 3.3 million barrels a day currently.