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The head of Iraq’s oil industry has said that the country has no plans to carry out a third auction round for the remainder of its vast hydrocarbon assets.
Reuters reported that Iraq’s Oil Minister, Hussain al-Shahristani told reporters at the OPEC meeting in Angola that the Gulf state was not expecting oil output to increase dramatically in the short term, but was expecting the current level of 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd) to rise to around 12 million bpd within six to seven years.
“We don’t really feel the urgency of going into new bid rounds and keep on building new capacity at this stage,” Shahristani is reported as saying.
“We don’t expect Iraq’s production to increase significantly next year or even in 2011,” he added.
The OPEC meeting in the Angolan capital of Luanda is expected to decide to maintain current production levels.Â