A consortium led by Cnooc Ltd. (CEO), the Hong-Kong-listed unit of China National Offshore Oil Corp., will sign a final deal with Iraq to develop the 2.5 billion-barrel Missan oil field complex in southern Iraq , a senior Iraqi oil ministry official said Thursday.

Sabah Abdul Kadhem al-Saadi, director of the legal and commercial office at the Oil Ministry's Petroleum Contracts and Licensing Directorate, told Dow Jones Newswires the deal would be clinched following approval by the Iraqi cabinet.

Cnooc and its partner, Sinochem International Corp. (600500.SH), in March agreed to the Iraqi oil ministry's proposals to develop the three Missan fields--Fakka, Buzurgan and Abu Ghirab and they signed an initial pact with the oil ministry in that month.

It isn't known, however, if Sinochem is still interested in the deal. Saadi said that Sinochem had asked to rejoin the consortium after it decided a few weeks ago to leave it.

"The ministry has accepted their request to return to the consortium but if they don't show up on Monday, they won't be allowed to participate any more," he said.

Saadi, however, said that the state-run Turkish Petroleum Corp., known as TPAO, had joined Cnooc to develop the field. "The ministry has agreed to a request submitted by TPAO to join the consortium led by Cnooc to develop Missan oil fields," he said without giving further details.

Cnooc set a production plateau target for the oil fields at 450,000 barrels a day to be reached in six years and accepted the ministry's remuneration fee of $2.30 a barrel.

The fields are currently producing around 100,000 barrels a day, Saadi said.

The Cnooc/Sinochem alliance made an unsuccessful bid for the complex in the country's first licensing auction in June. The two Chinese state-run firms initially offered a remuneration fee of $21.40 for each extra barrel of oil produced and suggested raising production from the fields to 450,000 barrels a day. They subsequently lowered the fee to $18.09 a barrel, but that was still much higher than Baghdad 's proposed fee of $2.30 a barrel.

Missan would be the 11th of a series of deals that Iraq has signed with international companies since November in a bid to quadruple the country's crude oil production, which stands at 2.4 million barrels a day.

It would also make the Chinese oil companies the dominant foreign players in Iraq 's promising oil sector, following three big development deals they signed this year and last year, including the one for the supergiant Rumaila oil field in partnership with BP PLC (BP).

The Chinese were the only companies that bid last year for Missan oil fields because other companies were discouraged from bidding for the fields because some of them are in a disputed area near the border with Iran .

In December, Iranian troops occupied an Iraqi well in the Fakka field bordering Iran and caused a political and diplomatic row between the two countries. In February, the Baghdad government said that Iran withdrew its troops from the field but wanted negotiations to demarcate the borders.

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