China Just Got Handed The Oil Deal Of A Lifetime

China and Russia are sewing up whatever oil and gas fields and accompanying infrastructure that they can in Iran and Iraq, as Iraq tries to markedly up the pace of development on the fields it shares with Iran. Iraq only wants the U.S. for the Common Seawater Supply Project (CSSP) because ExxonMobil is the only firm that can do it properly and within a reasonable timeframe. ExxonMobil’s participation, though, is far from guaranteed.

Of all the key shared fields - Azadegan (Iran side)/Majnoon (Iraq side), Azar/Badra, Yadavaran/Sinbad, and Dehloran/Abu Ghurab, Naft Shahr/Khorramshahr – the first of these has been a priority for Iran since it was severely flooded in March. It is this field that was the focus of the announcement last week that two major new drilling contracts have been signed: one with China’s Hilong Oil Service & Engineering Company to drill 80 wells at a cost of US$54 million and the other with the Iraq Drilling Company to drill 43 wells at a cost of US$255 million.

According to senior oil and gas industry sources spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, it is China that will do all of the work and finance all of the drilling, with the headline ‘Iraq Drilling Company’ being on the contract simply to assuage the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, the de facto leader of Iraq, and his Sairoon (‘Marching Towards Reform’) power bloc whose public message at the last election was that Iraq should not be beholden to any other country. OilPrice.com understands that al-Sadr privately has approved the project, otherwise, of course, it would not be going ahead.

Located around 60 kilometres to the north-east of the main southern export terminal of Basra, the supergiant Majnoon oilfield is one of the world’s largest, holding an estimated 38 billion barrels of oil in place. Rather literally, the field’s name means ‘insane’ in Arabic, derived from its possessing an ‘insanely’ large amount of oil. Discovered in 1975 by Brazil’s Braspetro (now part of Petrobras), it has been subject to a microcosm of the troubles that have affected the Iraq oil industry as a whole, with two U.S.-led wars, the war against Iran, and ongoing domes­tic security issues leading to the cancellation of various deals with international oil companies (IOCs) over the past 40 years. A major ongoing problem for development remains the substantial quantity of unexploded ordinance in and around the site that dates back to the 1980-1988 Iran Iraq War.

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