Iraq's South Oil Company, the largest government utility by crude oil
production, has shortlisted four international companies for the contract to
build a loading terminal at the southern port of Basra,
with a value of $500 million, a person at the company said Monday.
"We are assessing four commercial offers submitted by international
companies," the person told Dow Jones Newswires by telephone from Basra in southern Iraq.
The Single Point Mooring buoys, which would be able to handle some 900,000
barrels a day of oil exports, would be funded by the Japanese International
Cooperation Authority, which is part of the $5 billion that Japan pledged to Iraq in 2003.
The contract would also include laying a 50-kilometer pipeline from the crude
oil gathering depots in the FawPeninsula in Basra to
the new terminal in the Persian Gulf.
The new SPM buoys will be the fourth the company is building in the Gulf after
awarding a $733 million contract last year to Foster Wheeler Ltd. (FWLT) and
Leighton Offshore Private Ltd. to build 3 SMPs and two pipelines, each 50 kilometer long.
The entire SOC project, expected to be worth $1.4 billion, aims to ease
bottlenecks at Iraqi export terminals and will raise export capacity from 1.8
million barrels a day now to 4.5 million barrels a day by the end of 2012.
The first SPM is expected to be completed in November, adding some 900,000
barrels a day to Iraq's
southern export capacity, Iraqi oil minister Abdul Kareem Luaiby said recently.
Iraq
is currently producing more than 2.1 million barrels a day from southern oil
fields but only exporting 1.8 million barrels a day because of a lack of export
capacity, Iraqi oil officials said. By the end of this year output from the
south is expected to reach 2.5 million barrels a day, they said.
Iraq's
total oil production currently stands at 2.7 million barrels a day. It exported
2.2 million barrels in May. Baghdad
is aiming to boost its output to at least 8 million barrels a day after signing
13 deals in the past two years to upgrade its oil fields.