Oil minister itemises four French energy projects, with seawater injection the new element

BAGHDAD — Iraq is advancing four energy projects with French companies covering oil production, gas processing, seawater injection and solar power, the oil minister said, setting out the components of work already largely announced and adding one that has not been detailed before.

“There are four important projects whose outcomes we are awaiting,” Basim Mohammed Khudair said. “The first is the development of the Artawi field with a capacity of 210,000 barrels per day, the second is the investment of gas from five fields with a capacity of 600 million standard cubic feet per day in two phases, at 300 million standard cubic feet for each phase, the third is the project to invest and use seawater for injection purposes to compensate for depleted reservoir pressure, while the fourth concerns solar energy investment with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts, and we have entered its first phase with a capacity of 250 megawatts.”

The first, second and fourth are elements of the Gas Growth Integrated Project and the Basra Sun solar plant, both already under way with TotalEnergies. Contracts signed a year ago covered a central processing facility designed for 210,000 barrels of oil a day and a gas plant of 600 million cubic feet a day, and construction began on the solar project in March last year.

Seawater injection is the element that has not been set out publicly. Pumping treated seawater into ageing southern reservoirs to restore the pressure that lifts crude to the surface has been a constraint on Iraqi output for more than a decade, and without it the government’s target of raising capacity from 4.8 million barrels a day to 10 million within five years is difficult to reach. Khudair gave no capacity figure, cost or timeline for it.

The gas component matters for electricity. Six hundred million cubic feet a day is about a third of what the Electricity Ministry said in April its power stations needed in imported gas to run at capacity.

Khudair said the ministry was working to provide “an attractive investment environment” for international companies and would keep presenting oil, electricity and other projects to French firms while removing obstacles to investment. “French companies, including Total, are among the major international companies working with Iraq in the promising Artawi field,” he said.

It follows Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s meetings in Paris with French business leaders and TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanné, who said the company’s investments in Iraq total about $12 billion and could rise to $16 billion.