Iraq’s oil ministry currently is actively engaged with a number of projects on which it had already embarked or which it needed to tackle after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Among these, eight have the highest priority.
1. Rehabilitating dilapidated and often-sabotaged infrastructure and building up production capacity to the prewar level of 2.5 million b/d-to be followed by restoration to a historical maximum of 3.5 million b/d. This task has proven difficult under the severe burden of continual acts of sabotage.
2. Simultaneously training engineers, managers, and other staff to upgrade Iraq’s oil industry with state-of-the-art technology and management skills after 3 decades of neglect resulting from totalitarian rule, wars, and United Nations sanctions.
3. Studying the reservoir conditions of discovered and producing fields, updating regional assessment of the country’s petroleum prospects, and drawing composite plans with different scenarios for expanding and building production capacity.
Priority should be given to developing the many oil formations above and below currently producing main pays and to rehabilitating damaged main pays at Kirkuk and Rumaila oil fields to increase production, a scenario that current Oil Minister Bahr al-Ulum has already observed.
4. Preparing plans to modify the oil ministry’s organization in anticipation of relinquishing the operating and commercial roles to Iraq National Oil Co. (INOC) while retaining policy, regulatory, and supervisory roles.
5. Carrying out a survey for human, hardware, software, and other resources under the oil ministry’s jurisdiction and that of other ministries to best manage anticipated exploration and development needs.
6. Meeting the needs of a future market economy where private enterprise in the oil sector nationwide is encouraged and supported through many means, including integrating requirements for local content into intenational oil companies (IOC) contractual obligations.
7. Preparing model tenders for exploration and development contracts to govern the operations of INOC and IOCs and above all, preparing an oil policy, an INOC charter, and a new petroleum law.
8. Tendering oil and gas agreements, which has not been the practice in the past. This should be the only process for selecting companies interested in working on exploration and development and related projects (see accompanying article, p.22).
