Word: shahrastani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...drop from its high of 3.7 million barrels in 1979, when Saddam boosted production to finance his calamitous war with neighboring Iran. A government adviser recently told Britain's Independent newspaper that only about one-third of the 1,400 wells in southern Iraq are functioning. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrastani estimates it will cost about $50 billion to upgrade infrastructure needed to produce Iraq's target of 6 million barrels a day by 2017. "Iraq's oil industry is in a dire state," says Samuel Ciszuk, Middle East energy analyst for the consultancy firm IHS Global Insight in London. "Decades...
...While stability is returning, this relative peace is fragile. Iraqi officials and oil executives have rushed to sign contracts before national elections scheduled for January, since no one knows whether the current government will remain in power. Shahrastani is under fire from opposition politicians, who are complaining of widespread corruption and mismanagement in his ministry. In addition, oil contracts signed during the past five years with the Kurdistan Regional Government, whose three semiautonomous Iraqi provinces until recently exported about 100,000 barrels of oil a day, have been declared illegal by Baghdad, forcing Kurdish leaders to halt exports in October...
...consequences have been really quite severe. Things are in bad shape," says James Placke, senior associate of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who spent decades in the region as a U.S. diplomat. "It is not a good investment environment." That is an understatement. Iraq's oil minister Hussein al-Shahrastani has said in recent months that it will take about $20 billion to fix Iraq's equipment well enough to more than double its current output of about 2 million barrels a day, to about 4.5 million barrels in five years' time. In Iraq, that is a very long time...
| 1 |