Friday, March 29, 2024

Baghdad

Iraq’s oil production up 36% in 2017: official

 Iraq’s oil production up 36% in 2017: official

An oil field in Kirkuk.

An oil field in Kirkuk.
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Iraq’s oil production surged by 36% in 2017 compared to 2014, an Iraqi cabinet official said in statements quoted by Qatar News Agency (QNA).

Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesperson of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s media office, said oil produced by Iraqi in 2015 was 20 percent higher than 2014’s 3.11 million barrels.

Associated gas production also moved up by 50 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to Hadithi, who added that 2800 million cubic feet of that gas went untapped during the same period.

Since March 2016, Iraqi exported more than 2.3 million barrels of condensates, plus more than 40.000 tons of liquefied natural gas, with revenues standing at USD100 million.

During the third quarter of 2016, Iraq became a LNG exporter, according to the agency.

Late last March, Iraq’s petroleum exporting company, SOMO, said Iraq had cut down its oil production by 300.000 barrels per day to 4.46 millions.

Iraq plans to increase its crude production to five million barrels per day before the end of 2017. Its reserves soared in February to 153 billion barrels.

Iraq is OPEC’s second largest oil producer, following Saudi Arabia. It had pledged to cut 210.000 barrels of its daily production to 4.35 million barrels starting January in line with an historic OPEC members agreement reached in a Vienna meeting in December. It had previously been reluctant to take the move citing its terrorism-battered economy. OPEC took the move in an attempt to prop up falling oil prices.

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