JEDDAH: Iraq signed an agreement with oil giant BP in Baghdad on Thursday to develop four oil and gas fields in the northern Kirkuk region.
The British company and Iraq’s oil ministry had signed a letter of intent in 2013 to study the development of the giant Kirkuk oilfield, which contains about nine billion barrels of recoverable oil.
But that deal was put on hold in 2014 when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of Daesh’s sweeping advance in northern and western Iraq, allowing the Kurdish regional government to take control of the Kirkuk region. Baghdad regained full control in 2017 after a failed Kurdish independence referendum.
BP will now start drawing up a major plan to boost output capacity of crude oil and gas from Kirkuk, Bai Hasan, Jambour and Khabbaz fields, Iraq oil ministry officials said.
The Kirkuk field's reservoir was discovered in 1927 and is where Iraq’s oil industry was founded.
Iraq is the second-biggest OPEC producer behind Saudi Arabia, with the capacity to produce almost 5 million barrels of oil a day.
BP said rehabilitation of existing facilities and the construction of new ones, including gas expansion projects and a drilling program in Kirkuk, had the potential to stabilize production and reverse previous decline.
