East Asia and Iraq’s oil winners

KITAKYUSHU, JAPAN - Petronas of Malaysia and the Japan Petroleum Exploration Company (Japex) will jointly invest a total of about $7 billion to develop Iraq’s Gharaf oilfield. The announcement was made at the end of a two-day bidding round for ten major oil contracts.

Petronas will hold a 60 percent share and Japex a 40 percent share. The Gharaf oil field has estimated reserves of about 860 million barrels and a projected output at 230,000 barrels per day (bpd) (which would be more than 5 percent of Japan’s total oil needs). The official agreement is expected to be signed in January and run for twenty years. Petronas and Japex beat out three other bids - a joint Turkish-Indian bid, a consortium made up of Kazakh, South Korean and Italian companies, and a bid from Indonesia’s Pertamina.