Posted on 05/08/2019 11:08:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Iraq is planning a $53 billion megaproject with global energy giants ExxonMobil and PetroChina to use seawater from the Persian Gulf to boost oil production, Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi announced Tuesday.
The 30-year project would boost output from Iraq’s southern oil fields, and includes designs to capture natural gas, which is currently lost to flaring, for production, Abdel-Mahdi said at a press conference.
Iraq is producing oil at record levels, but officials are targeting even higher output to meet budget projections and finance reconstruction projects following 16 years of war.
Output averaged 4.5 million barrels per day in March, second only to Saudi Arabia in OPEC, according to data from the global oil consortium.
Water injection is key to boosting production from oil fields around Basra, in south Iraq, as decades of extraction have sapped the subterranean pressures that push crude naturally toward the surface.
Water can be pumped into hydrocarbon formations to make up for the falling pressure and force oil to the surface, but the process is highly energy-intensive to clean, deoxygenate, and nearly desalinate the seawater before injection.
Last week, Abdel-Mahdi, in Berlin, announced that Iraq had agreed to a $14 billion “roadmap” with German industrial giant Siemens to rebuild the country’s crumbling electricity sector.
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyandmarkets.com ...
get the money up front
why on earth would they use ‘flaring’ ? that always seemed to me a huge waste.
Sounds good. Hope it works out for both sides
No market, or means to get the gas to a buyer. If you want to produce the oil you bring gas with it.
But won’t all this oil lead to more global warming?
/s
Desalinization of injection sea water seems an odd requirement as the formation water likely far more saline
Hmmm... Notice the Chinese angle...
Of course, but since they are drawing sea water and injecting it below land surface, it balances sea level rise. Double /s
Maybe that qualifies for some sort of green subsidy
How many mid-east countries got big oil companies to build oil pumping and refining facilities and then nationalized them?
My question is will crude, unprocessed oil burn well enough to burn down windmills?
All the ones that didn't have U.S. military bases in them.
This is what classic fascism looks like, folks.
I thought the same thing. Southern Iraq, particularly Basra, is now effectively part of Iran.
I guess that Chinese are offering protection from Iran. Americans are offering Chinese legitimacy and approval from USA.
China owns an island recently purchased from Kuwait, they’re going to be after some milkshakes no doubt.
If it is volatile enough to have to flare gas, heck yes it will burn down about anything
From my personal experience in irq, circa 2003, with US Army Corps of engineers task force Restore Iraqi Oil, most Iraqi crude contains both natural gas and hydrogen sulfide gases, making it very corrosive on hardware and difficult to separate, so burning it was the easy solution...
Ah... it seems a shame not to use that heat for something though...
Generate electricity?
To raise budgets to rebuild after 16 years of war? A war they didn’t pay for and projects we have already given billions to complete.
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