Director General Sameer al-Taie's dismissal comes amidst a corruption investigation, and following the assassination of a candidate to replace him.
The new projects could bring 150,000 bpd of new refining capacity and help push the KRG from subsidies to market-based fuel pricing.
Basim Mohammed Khudair, a senior South Oil Company (SOC) official, has been named acting director general of the Iraqi Drilling Company (IDC).
Protestors throughout south Iraq are angry at another summer with inadequate electricity, with some threatening an oil project at Majnoon.
Chronic outages due to smuggling and technical failures along the Turkish side of the Iraq-Turkey Pipeline have sapped both federal and KRG oil sales.
The anti-IS coalition has at least temporarily set aside divergent interests in a concerted effort to dislodge militants from Ramadi and Fallujah.
Both sides are seeking multi-billion-dollar damages in a bitter battle over Kurdistan's most prospective gas fields.
The overhaul in Iraq's blending and marketing of southern crude helped raise southern exports and compensate for a dip in northern exports hampered by political disputes.
Iraq has cut the annual budget of its second-most-prolific oil project by nearly 50 percent, as part of a broader effort to reduce oil field development costs in response to a financial crisis.
A senior official at the state-run North Oil Company, who was last year put forward to be the next director general, was assassinated as he left work on Sunday.
