Akkas gas output to reach 400 million cubic feet a day by 2030, company says

BAGHDAD — Iraq aims to raise production at the Akkas field in Anbar from about 43 million standard cubic feet of gas a day to 400 million by 2030, a nine-fold increase, as it tries to cut its dependence on imported gas for power generation.

Midland Oil Company will meet a ConocoPhillips delegation in Baghdad shortly to work out how to implement an agreement with the government, director general Mohammed Yassin Hassan told the Iraqi News Agency. “There will be sessions to agree on the mechanism for implementing the agreement,” he said. “This agreement is a moral commitment and does not include a financial commitment, so the mechanism must be discussed.”

The economic model drawn up for Akkas in 2010 no longer fits, he said. “The oil fields are complex fields, and the Akkas field has gone through many stages. The economic model on which it was built in 2010 is not the same in 2026, so the company that comes in must obtain the information needed to establish the mechanism for implementing the agreement.”

A contract with Schlumberger to drill six wells and build a 100 million cubic feet a day processing plant could be finished by mid-2027, taking the field to about 143 million, Hassan said. “Our ambition is for the Akkas field to produce 400 million standard cubic feet per day.”

Set against Iraq’s needs, the target is modest. The Electricity Ministry said in April that power stations needed about 50 million cubic metres of imported gas a day — roughly 1.8 billion cubic feet — to run at capacity, and supplies were far below that. Domestic production fell from about 1.1 billion cubic feet a day to around 400 million during the conflict earlier this year, because so much of Iraq’s gas comes up with its crude.

The Islamic State group took the Akkas area in 2014 and destroyed infrastructure there, Hassan said, with Midland Oil later restarting production. Iraq was using about 74% of its associated gas as of late 2025 and aims to end routine flaring by the end of the decade. The Khor Mor field in the Kurdistan Region, the country’s largest, reached 750 million cubic feet a day of processing capacity after an expansion last year and began supplying 100 million a day to a federal power station in Kirkuk this month. The government has set 2030 as its target for gas self-sufficiency, with Akkas and Mansuriya among the projects meant to deliver it.