Kurdistan
Abdullah al-Qadi, executive director of Crescent Petroleum, speaking to Rudaw on October 10, 2023. Photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The UAE-based Crescent Petroleum has the capabilities to provide 75 percent of the Kurdistan Region’s electricity demands and its gas production exceeds 500 million standard cubic feet per day, its executive director said.
“We are proud that we can provide about 75 percent of the quantities of electricity present in the Kurdistan Region,” Abdullah al-Qadi, executive director of Crescent Petroleum, told Rudaw’s Mohammed Sheikh Fatih in an interview last week, noting that the oil and gas company’s produce supplies power plants in Erbil and Sulaimani with gas.
Crescent Petroleum and its affiliate, Dana Gas, struck an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in 2007 to develop the Region’s substantial gas resources. They also agreed to establish Kurdistan Gas City to promote private sector investment. Dana Gas has developed its production capacity gradually to 500 million standard cubic feet for day.
The company primarily operates in the Khor Mor gas field, located in Sulaimani’s Chamchamal district.
An expansion project currently in the works, known as KM250, is expected to increase the production of gas to 700 MMscf/d by April 2023. The project is supported by a 7-year $250 million financing agreement in conjunction with the US International Development Finance Corporation.
However, security incidents such as the repeated targeting of Khor Mor by rocket attacks has disrupted the expansion project.
“Regarding the issue of the first expansion project, it was unfortunately disrupted due to some security incidents that occurred during the recent period,” Qadi said, but affirmed that “the company was able, despite all these challenged and difficult security circumstances, to continue working, and the project is currently at its end.”
The executive director thanked the Iraqi and Kurdish governments for helping them overcome the security challenges that threatened their operations.
Khor Mor field has repeatedly come under rocket attacks, reportedly by Iran-affiliated Iraqi militia groups. Despite the security threats on the gas field, Dana Gas last year said they would be able to meet the Kurdistan Region’s full gas demands in about two years.
In August, the field came under attack once again by two rockets, the first such attack in months.
Qadi also confirmed that an arbitration row involving Baghdad, Erbil, and Ankara has not halted their production.
“I am proud to be part of an institution that did not stop its operations in the Kurdistan Region or reduce its employees, and we did not lay off a single worker and did not reduce production costs necessary for the expansion project … despite the impact on us in financial terms,” he said.
Oil exports from the Kurdistan Region through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline have been halted since March 23 after a Paris-based arbitration court ruled in favor of Baghdad against Ankara, saying the latter breached a 1973 agreement by allowing Erbil to begin independent oil exports in 2014.
The halt in exports has caused the Kurdish and Iraqi governments about $6 billion of losses since March, a senior Kurdish official said late last month.
“We continue and have not stopped generating gas for a single second,” Qadi said.
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