Iraq holds back on Exxon’s Kurdish deal

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The Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it will respect existing contracts with ExxonMobil Corp in the south of the country after the company signed new oil deals with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the north. The political center in Baghdad considers such contracts with the KRG illegal.

The government has, however, excluded ExxonMobil from the next national round of licensing, according to reports by AK News, also known as Kurdistan News Agency. The next licensing round is due early next March.

ExxonMobil is producing crude with Royal Dutch Shell at the West Qurna field in southern Iraq, west of Basra, following a bid accepted by Baghdad in November 2009. However, it is involved only in the field’s first-phase development, as in December of that year Russia’s Lukoil and Norway’s Statoil were awarded rights for second-phase development.

For Baghdad to breach its agreement with ExxonMobil at West Qurna over the KRG contracts would perhaps irreparably harm badly needed business confidence during the upcoming licensing round. There appears to be no legal basis that the central government could invoke in favor of such an annulment.

Because the central Baghdad government has never passed a law governing new oil and gas concessions, the agreement with ExxonMobil on West Qurna is in the form of a service contract with rather tight profit margins.

Observers speculate that the company would not have minded being excluded from West Qurna, or that it was negotiating with the KRG in an effort to obtain more favorable treatment from Baghdad. According to one industry rumor, Lukoil has already been in negotiations with ExxonMobil to purchase from the latter’s 60% stake a 37.5% interest in West Qurna One, with Shell taking the rest.

ExxonMobil’s West Qurna partner Shell was reportedly in talks with the KRG for a deal similar to ExxonMobil’s, but exited those negotiations after receiving, earlier this month, a 25-year $17 billion contract from the Baghdad central government, to capture 7.2 billion cubic meters (bcm) of flared gas per year from fields in the south near Basra for domestic usage.

Shell is cooperating with Mitsubishi in this venture and will also construct a petrochemical plant that could give it a dominant role in the corresponding domestic Iraqi economic sector.

The Basra governate, meanwhile, is seeking to assert greater authority over the Shell deal. The Baghdad center’s failure to pass a law governing new oil and gas ventures (the federal law was elaborated only in draft form and never adopted) tends, in the view of specialized international law experts, to give the “Oil and Gas Law of the Kurdistan Region” authority in the matter, insofar as its provisions mostly correspond with other pertinent articles of the federal constitution.

More at: http://ikjnews.com/?p=2743

H/T: Canadian Value

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