Oil companies occupy a unique position at the intersection of global economics, politics, and security. Part of the reason for this is that energy is a crucial determinant of every country’s financial future and therefore its political manoeuvrings at home and abroad. Another part is that oil firms’ enterprises in foreign lands are enormous and multilayered operations involving the cultivation of relationships at the highest levels of a host nation’s government, industry, and society. The final part is that oil companies are legally entitled to protect their assets on the ground in a foreign country by whatever means they think necessary, provided the host nation agrees. For a long time, the West led the way in forging and cementing international relationships through such oil ventures, particularly in the Middle East, as analyzed in depth in my latest book on the new global oil market order. Several military and political missteps later, especially in Iraq, China and Russia have filled the power vacuum left by the reduction of the West’s influence across the region. However, last April saw the final ratification of a US$27 billion four-pronged deal between France’s TotalEnergies and the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad. And just over a week ago, the U.K.’s BP signed a preliminary agreement to rehabilitate and develop four fields in the hugely oil-rich region of Kirkuk in Iraq’s politically sensitive northern region.
The Kirkuk area is perhaps the most politically-charged point of contention between the FGI centered in the southern Iraqi capital of Baghdad and the government of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan (the KRG) based in Erbil in Iraq’s north. According to several accredited historical sources, the Kurds settled in Kirkuk long before any other ethnic groups, and the site has been referred to by various Kurdish leaders as ‘the Jerusalem of Kurdistan’. As such, the KRG has long claimed implicit jurisdiction over the city and region of Kirkuk, over which it exercised effective administrative control from 2014 to 2017. During this period, the KRG’s fearsome Peshmerga army safeguarded Kirkuk from the then-rampant Islamic State (IS). In return for the force’s exceptional success in dealing with IS across much of Iraq, the KRG was quietly assured by Washington that the U.S. would back the Kurds’ wishes for full independence from Iraq once the IS threat was over. Consequently, on 25 September 2017, a vote on independence for the northern Iraq Kurds from the rest of Iraq took place – although by that point it had been reframed not as a legally binding vote but rather as a preliminary indicative one – and 92 percent of the 3.3 million population eligible to vote cast their ballots in favor of a new independent Kurdish country being formed to the north of the rest of Iraq. At that point, all hell broke loose.
For key Iraqi regional sponsor Iran, and for Turkey and Syria, the granting of independence for Iraq’s quasi-separate Kurdish state in the north was likely to bring with it a huge upsurge in similar demands from their own sizeable Kurdish populations. In Iran, these constituted around 9 percent of its total population, in Syria about 10 percent, and in Turkey nearly 18 percent. Immediately after the announcement of the Kurdish independence referendum, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a top military adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, called on the four neighboring countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) to block land borders with the Iraqi Kurdish region. Iran was – and remains – determined to safeguard its role as the key foreign player across all of Iraq. It continues to hold enormous sway over the Shi’ite Muslim groups that have ruled or held security and government positions in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. In broader geopolitical terms, Iran regarded the prospect of an independent Kurdistan with horror, as it also threatened its strategy of rolling out a Shia-dominated sphere of influence across the Middle East, led by Tehran, to overtake the then-U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian power base that had been the key force for the previous few decades. In this context, Iran’s fears were not helped when then-President Massoud Barzani stated at the end of 2017 that going forward Iraq should be divided into separate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed.
Iraq’s then-Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, in the meantime, began by calling the vote ‘unconstitutional’. He added that on this basis the FGI would take control of official border crossings linking the Kurdish region with neighboring countries and restricting international flights to and from Erbil and Sulaymaniyah airports. Additionally, Iraq’s parliament was given a mandate by al-Abadi to send troops to the disputed region of Kirkuk and called on ‘neighboring countries and countries of the world’ to stop buying crude oil directly from Kurdistan, only to deal with the FGI in Baghdad. This built on earlier statements by al-Abadi that he had ordered the Oil Ministry to mobilize all its legal resources to prevent all ships in the future from off-loading all crude oil exports by the KRG, to any destination, after several incidents in which KRG oil had been loaded onto tankers for export. This was the genesis of the ongoing impasse between the FGI and the KRG over independent oil sales from the semi-autonomous region that has resulted now in efforts being far advanced to end all independence for Iraqi Kurdistan and simply roll it into the rest of Iraq.
Exactly what the presence of TotalEnergies and BP will mean for Iraqi Kurdistan remains to be seen. On the one hand, it may concern the historically-ultra-aware Kurds that the forerunners of both BP and TotalEnergies – the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and Compagnie Française des Pétroles, respectively – were significant stakeholders (23.75 percent each) in the Turkish Petroleum Company consortium that dominated oil exploration and production in Iraq from 1925 to 1961. On the other, though, the two firms have long been part of a small group of major oil and gas firms that have been at the vanguard of Western efforts to secure oil and gas flows following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This has been done despite enormous competition from Chinese and Russian firms whose focus has been to tie up as much of these crucial energy flows as possible to the detriment of the West, as global oil and gas supplies are a zero-sum game. The West was also supportive for a long time of Iraqi Kurdistan’s quasi-independent status, so it may be that it looks to reassert a balance between the FGI and KRG over time, with Kirkuk being an example of how a new version of the 2014 oil-for-budget-payments deal might work more effectively.
The collaborative history of the UK and French firms may also result in synergies down the line for their Iraqi projects. Most notable, perhaps, is TotalEnergies’s work on finally getting the crucial Common Seawater Supply Project (CSSP) underway, with the first phase of the updated project now expected to be operational in 2028. The CSSP involves taking five million bpd of seawater from the Persian Gulf initially, which will then be transported via pipelines to oil production facilities in the provinces of Basra, Missan, and DhiQar for the purpose of maintaining pressure in their key oil reservoirs to optimize the longevity and output of their fields. Both the longstanding stalwart fields of Iraq - Kirkuk and Rumaila, the former beginning production in the 1920s and the latter in the 1950s, with both having produced around 80 percent of the country’s cumulative oil production – require major ongoing water injection. According to industry figures, the reservoir pressure at Kirkuk dropped significantly after output of only around 5 percent of the oil in place (OIP). Rumaila, in the meantime, produced more than 25 percent of its OIP before water injection was required (as its main formation connects to a large source of groundwater).
Cooperation between BP and TotalEnergies in this regard could significantly boost the oil output of Iraq in both the south and the north. Officially, according to the Energy Information Administration, Iraq holds a very conservatively estimated 145 billion barrels of proved crude oil reserves. Unofficially, it is extremely likely that it holds much more oil than this, as analyzed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order. In October 2010, Iraq’s Oil Ministry increased its own official figure for the country’s proven reserves but at the same time stated that Iraq’s undiscovered resources amounted to around 215 billion barrels. Even this figure, though, did not include oil in the Iraqi Kurdistan region. As separately highlighted by the International Energy Agency, the level of ultimately recoverable resources across all of Iraq (including the Kurdistan region) is probably around 246 billion barrels (crude and natural gas liquids).
By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com