Thirty-eight international oil companies registered at the Iraqi oil ministry to bid for the 11 groups of oil and gas fields put up for a second bidding round by Iraq at the end of last year, a senior Iraqi oil official said Tuesday.
Abdul Mahdy al-Ameedi, deputy director general at Iraq's petroleum contracts and licensing directorate, or PCLD, said the ministry had stopped receiving qualification documents from companies since the closing deadline on Feb. 15.
"The directorate will examine these documents and it is planning to announce a list of new qualified companies by the end of March," al-Ameedi told Dow Jones Newswires by telephone from Baghdad.
Al-Ameedi didn't name these companies but he said they were from Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
Last year, Iraq pre-qualified 35 international oil companies, including the world's majors, for its first bidding round announced in June 2008, which included the country's largest oil producing fields. Deals from this bidding round are expected to be signed in June, Iraqi oil officials say.
The 35 companies were qualified out of 120 firms submitted their qualification documents to the ministry.
Al-Ameedi attributed the declining number of companies registering for the second round compared with the first round to "the world's current financial crisis."
He also said another reason is that only companies which have good experience on oil and gas exploration operations are eligible to register for the bidding round as one condition set by the PCLD.
The other condition set by the PCLD was that each company should pay the oil ministry's financial department $10,000 and some companies couldn't pay that amount in due time as they don't have representatives in Baghdad and need to travel to Iraq to do so.
Iraq opened the race on Dec. 31 for international companies to compete for the development of a total of 16 oil and gas fields categorized in 11 groupings.
The new oil fields will add between 2 million-2.5 million barrels a day of crude production capacity, oil officials said. Iraq is currently producing 2.4 million barrels a day.
Contracts for the second bidding round are expected to be signed by the end of 2009 and will be service agreements.