Oil Major BP PLC (BP) and partner China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC received a total of $4.5 billion until the end of 2012 for their investments in the supergiant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq , a senior Iraqi oil official has said.

The partnership is developing the 17-billion-barrel Rumaila, near Basra . The field, Iraq 's largest, is currently pumping around 1.4 million barrels a day and it is expected to hit 2.1 million barrels a day in 2017.

Baghdad has paid a total of $8.5 billion until the end of 2012 to companies working in Iraq , Abdul Mehdy al-Ameedi, head of the Oil Ministry's petroleum contracts, also told the Wall Street Journal.

Among the paid firms should be U.S. energy giant Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Italy 's largest oil producer, Eni SpA (E), which are developing West Qurna-1 and Zubair oil fields in southern Iraq respectively.

Mr. Ameedi, who was speaking on the sidelines of an Iraqi oil meeting in Amman late Tuesday night, gave no details of how much precisely each company was paid except for BP and CNPC.

Exxon Mobil and Eni and their partners have invested billions of dollars to upgrade these three supergiant fields.

"Total costs spent by these firms as well as accumulated remunerations from producing oil from these fields have reached between $16 billion and $17 billion," Mr. Ameedi said.

The three fields are among a number of oil fields Iraq auctioned off to international oil companies in 2009 under service contracts, which stipulate that the firms start to be paid to recover costs once they boost production by 10% above an agreed baseline production.
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