The Iraqi Oil Ministry has approved a further six companies for the fourth auction round of exploration blocs, according to a senior Ministry official reported by Reuters.
The new additions raise the total amount of potential bidders to 46, after US firm Hess was booted out for doing deals in the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan which Baghdad claims are illegal.
The fourth round, slated to be held in January 2012, will comprise 12 blocs which are expected to add 29 trillion cubic feet of gas and 10 billion barrels of oil to Iraqi reserves.
Iraq’s Oil Ministry has set ambitious oil production targets and the country has an urgent demand to secure more gas for domestic power generation and to diversify Iraq’s export profile. Iraqis currently enjoy only an average four hours of electricity per day.
“We have six companies that were not qualified first, but after reviewing their information, we asked them to submit further documents to support their position. We have decided to qualify them after they offered the required documents,” Abdul-Mahdy al-Ameedi, director of the Oil Ministry’s Contracts and Licensing Directorate, told Reuters.
Ameedi said the six new companies were: Dubai-based oil explorer Dragon Oil, which is currently focused on offshore fields in Turkmenistan, commodities giant Glencore, Syrian-focused Gulfsands Petroleum, China’s Zhenhua Oil, Switzerland’s Vitol and Romania’s Romgaz.
Iraq auctioned three major natural gas fields to foreign companies last October.
