Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*More on the Shell gas deal
*German, UAE and Iran investors eye southern refineries
*Alive in Baghdad: Selling Fuel
*Kidnapping in the NOC

Iraq won’t award temporary oilfield services contracts to international companies before a bidding round aimed at bringing in foreign expertise to boost crude production, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said, Bloomberg News reports. Iraq will instead go ahead with new long-term exploration contracts before approving a new energy law, he said. The country pre-qualified 35 U.S., European and Asian companies for a new exploration licensing round.

Reuters has more.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, is set to start operations in Iraq after a 35-year absence when it signs an agreement with the Iraqi Oil Ministry to capture gas outside the southern city of Basra, Bloomberg reports. The Iraqi cabinet approved the venture between Shell and the ministry, Shell spokesman Peter van Boesschoten said today in a telephone interview from The Hague.

Foreign investors from Germany, the United Arab Emirates and Iran are offering to set up oil refineries in southern Iraq, Azzaman reports. These entrepreneurs, both individuals and companies, want to set a foot in the country with signs that conditions are returning to normal, said Kadhem Ismael head of the Investment Commission in the southern Province of Dhi Qar.

JURIST Special Guest Columnists Nancy Wohlforth and Fred Mason, Co-Convenors of U.S. Labor Against the War, say that the proposed Iraqi oil law would put effective control of most of Iraq’s vast oil resources into the hands of foreign companies and make a mockery of any real Iraqi sovereignty

Alive in Baghdad: Selling Fuel in Baghdad

The gas and the fuel for cars has always been a problem for Iraqis inside Iraq, the irony that Iraq has one of the worlds largest reservoirs of oil is not lost on Iraqis.

A civil servant who works for the Iraqi North Oil Company (NOC) was kidnapped by an armed group, southwestern Kirkuk, manager of the province’s suburbs and districts police said on Monday, Voices of Iraq reports.

Parliament’s session was adjourned without approving the provincial council elections law, MP from the Kurdistan Islamic Union said, while Parliament’s speaker decided to hold a meeting for the heads of the parliamentary bloc for this purpose on Wednesday, Voices of Iraq reports.

Nicholas Spangler and Sahar Issa have more for McClatchy Newspapers: A premature vote, warned Ali Adib, of the ruling Dawaa Party, could lead to another veto by the Kurdish leadership. “It means we’ll go into crisis and the positions of the blocs will freeze and get more and more complicated,” he said.

Iraq’s finance minister traveled to Kuwait on Sunday to discuss payment of debts and compensation for Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of that country, Nicholas Spangler reports for McClatchy.

Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons, sleeping in sweltering temperatures in overcrowded cells without working fans, no daily access to showers, and subject to frequent sexual abuse by guards, current and former prisoners say, Jonathan Steele reports for The Guardian.

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