Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Iraq, home to the world's fourth-
largest oil reserves, has reached a tentative agreement on crude
exploration and revenue with the semi-autonomous Kurdish region,
according to an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri Kamil al-Maliki.
The central government and the Kurdish Regional Government
have reached 'mutually acceptable' solutions to long-standing
disputes over oil, territory and Kurdish armed forces, Adal
Barwari, al-Maliki's adviser on Kurdish affairs, said in a Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty interview published today on the U.S.-
government funded news outlet's website.
Barwari said in the interview that al-Maliki and Kurdish
Prime Minister Barham Salih held talks in Baghdad in late
October and appointed a trio of committees to hammer out their
differences. Those committees completed their final reports on
Nov. 5 and submitted them to al-Maliki and Salih, Barwari was
cited as saying in the interview.
Barwari told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he didn't
know the details of the agreements because the committee
recommendations had been submitted only to the prime ministers,
according to the report.
Comments Conflict
Barwari's comments conflict with central government denials
of any deal over the past two days after Exxon Mobil Corp.
signed contracts with the Kurdish authority to drill for crude
on six blocks in the northern part of the country.
'The Iraqi government will treat any company breaching its
laws in the same way it has treated similar companies in the
past,' the media office of Hussain al-Shahristani, the
country's deputy prime minister for energy affairs, said today
in an e-mailed statement. 'The ministry of oil has informed
Exxon Mobil of this position.'
Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Irving, Texas-based Exxon,
declined to comment. The Baghdad-based central government and
Kurdish authorities have clashed over how to oversee drilling
and allocate revenue from the Persian Gulf nation's crude
reserves since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Relations
reached a low point in 2009 when oil exports were temporarily
suspended.
Accord, Committee
The accord will be approved by the Iraqi parliament's Oil
and Energy Committee as soon as it's received, committee member
Bahaa al-Din Ahmad was cited as saying in the Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty article.
The agreement 'neither undermined the powers of the
central government nor undercut the rights of' the Kurdish
authority, Ahmad said, according to the article.
Kurdistan includes three regions in the country's north:
Erbil, Dohuk and Suleimaniah, governed by an elected parliament
and 19 government ministries overseeing everything from
agriculture to education to tourism, according to the regional
authority's website.
The central government counts the Kurdistan Regional
Authority as one of its 19 administrative divisions, according
to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's website.
The accord has ended the risk that foreign oil producers
such as Exxon, Marathon Oil Corp. and Gulf Keystone Petroleum
Ltd. would be stripped of some oilfield projects as punishment
for signing contracts in the Kurdish-controlled region, two
people familiar with the talks told Bloomberg News yesterday.
Exxon, the world's biggest company by market value, is the
latest Western entrant into Kurdistan. Others include Vallares
Plc, the explorer founded by former BP Plc Chief Executive
Officer Tony Hayward, Afren Plc, Hess Corp., Murphy Oil Corp.,
Marathon Oil Corp. and Repsol YPF SA.
Iraq's 115 billion barrels in estimated crude reserves are
exceeded only by those of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran,
according to BP's annual statistical review of global energy.
Canada's oil sands are counted as a different category from so-
called conventional resources in the BP statistics.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Joe Carroll in Chicago at
jcarroll8@bloomberg.net ;
Nayla Razzouk in Amman at
nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net ;
Kadhim Ajrash in Baghdad at
kajrash@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephen Voss at
sev@bloomberg.net
