Halliburton is currently in talks with Exxon Mobile to purchase the oil firm’s stake in the West Qurna-1 field in southern Iraq, the country’s oil minister said Monday, Bloomberg earlier reported.
Should the talks fail, Iraq will instead purchase the stake, Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar added, building on comments from a few days earlier when he noted that Basra Oil could also be a buyer.
“Basra Oil wants to acquire Exxon stake, but to maintain the balance of partners and market, we support a US partner,” Abdul Jabbar said, according to Bloomberg.
Iraq expects the monthly production increase of 400,000 barrels-a-day of production for OPEC+ to continue in January, Jabbar added, noting that the emergence of the omicron Covid-19 variant has not significantly impacted global oil demand.
Bloomberg reported that Halliburton had surfaced as a potential buyer of Exxon’s stake more than a month ago. Exxon was one of the first Western oil firms allowed into Iraq in 2010 following years of instability.
The minister said that discussion were also ongoing with Chevron on the economic model of the contract for its investment in Nasiriya, Bloomberg said, with a deal expected to be signed in Q1 2022. Iraq National Oil would be Chevron’s partner, holding a 40 percent stake in the venture.
