Joel Wing checks in on the country's oil industry:
2009 was the first year that major oil companies returned to Iraq en mass in two rounds of auctions for oil fields in southern Iraq. Oil companies were excited about Iraq’s potential, because it had been under international sanctions since 1990, and had huge untapped reserves as a result. Those high hopes have slowly, but surely been scuttled.
First, the service contracts offered by the Oil Ministry severely limited the profits open to the companies, and did not allow them to claim the reserves in the fields they were working on in their books. Second, they ran into Iraq’s infamous bureaucracy that held up almost everything from simple things like getting visas for foreign executives to enter the country to slowing down equipment arriving. These in part explain why some foreign firms have decided to invest in Kurdistan instead, even though the fields are much smaller, and there is uncertainty over whether they will be able to export oil any time soon.
The Dish 