Shafaq News/ An Iraqi-led consortium has signed agreements with seven companies to capture and process gas at the Nahr Bin Omar field in Basra—an effort by Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani's administration to increase domestic energy supplies and reduce the wasteful flaring of associated gas.
Ahmed al-Mohsin, the Chief of Operations at Rabban al-Safina Energy Group, said the company has signed nine Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with nine U.S. companies earlier today. Al-Mohsin added that the companies involved in the agreements include KBR, Honeywell, Baker Hughes, Emerson, and GE. He explained that the agreements cover various areas, including design, construction, and logistics, and feature high-efficiency production technology.
The agreements also call for 400 kilometers of pipelines to transport the gas, a marine export terminal, a gas processing plant, and other facilities.
In late 2023, the cabinet approved a "Build-Own-Operate-Transfer" (BOOT) deal for 15 years with Halfaya Gas Company, which is linked to Rabban al-Safina.
"The Nahr Bin Omar Gas Field Project is an integrated project that includes gas gathering, compression, processing, and LPG extraction," al-Mohsin said. "The project includes the construction of a pipeline to transport natural gas to power plants in Iraq, in addition to building an offshore platform at Umm Qasr Port to export liquefied gas to global markets."
The Nahr Bin Omar field is located in southern Iraq, 15 kilometers north of Basra. It contains reserves estimated at 6.6 billion barrels of oil, with a planned capacity to produce about 440,000 barrels a day (b/d), as well as 12 billion cubic feet a day (cf/d) of gas. The budget for the field development contract is estimated at $500 million. The gas processing plant, which has a planned capacity of 300 million cf/d, also has an estimated budget of $500 million.
Boosting the energy independence of Iraq, one of the world's top oil and gas producers, and reducing reliance on Iran, is a top policy goal for al-Sudani's government. However, Iraq's oil and gas fields have suffered years of underinvestment, and since 2018, Washington has had to issue Iran sanctions waivers to Iraq that allow it to buy power imported from the Islamic Republic.
Collecting and burning the gas to generate power can help fight climate change, as simply flaring it wastes the fuel while doing nothing to reduce demand for additional gas supply from Iran.