Kurdistan Region pays Gulf Keystone nearly $15 million for January oil share
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has made a gross payment of $14.7 million to British oil producing company Gulf Keystone for the sales it made from Sheikhan field in January.
“Gulf Keystone confirms that a gross payment of $14.7 million ($11.5 million net to GKP) has been received from the Kurdistan Regional Government for Shaikan crude oil sales during January 2019,” a statement released by the company on Friday said.
Gulf Keystone Petroleum operates in Sheikhan field in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s province of Duhok, which currently produces 40,000 barrels of oil per day.
The company first discovered Sheikhan field in 2009, which has plans to boost its daily production of crude oil in the field to 55,000 barrels per day. Overall production from the field has now exceeded 40 million barrels, the company says.
Other companies have commended the KRG for making timely payments as it recovers from the economic crunch.
During the past four years, the KRG was unable to make a regular and timely payments to energy companies operating in the Kurdistan Region due to its overstretched financial resources allocated partly to fund its war with the Islamic State (ISIS), accommodate an influx of refugees from Syria and displaced persons from Iraq, as well as its budget share cut by Baghdad in 2014.
Following its budget cut by the federal government, the KRG started to implement an unpopular salary-saving system that paid employees only a portion of their salaries. The system was rolled back following the passage of Iraq’s federal budget for 2019 that saw the Kurdistan Region receive a share in order to pay employee salaries.
Nearly 1.8 million Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) turned to the Kurdistan Region to seek shelter after the Syrian conflict exacerbated and the jihadist group swept through Iraq and took large swathes of territory in the country.
Now that relations between the KRG and Baghdad have improved, the KRG is in a better position to regularly pay oil and gas companies working in the region. And this will create better conditions for oil and gas companies to invest more in the region, helping Erbil recover from the financial setbacks of the past four years.
Brent Crude Oil traded at $72.15 per barrel on Saturday, according to the Financial Times — down from just over $74 on Monday when US sanctions targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps went into effect.