Big Oil start making excuses

The first excuse from Big Oil for not meeting their ambitious production targets that are given to Iraq came Thursday from U.K.'s BP, backing the analysts predictions that International Oil Companies offered inflated numbers only to scoop up lucrative oil deals.

BP's Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward, who signed himself BP's sole deal with Iraq to develop the 17.8 billion-barrel Rumaila field in Basra, put it in this simple shape:

“The challenges of execution on the ground and the need to build capability on the ground will mean that things will happen a little slower than all of us are perhaps planning on today,” Hawyard said in a discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“There’s no reason to believe Iraq can’t be producing 10 million barrels a day by 2020 or so,” he added.

BP and its partners China's CNPC have pledged to increase production at Rumaila from the current nearly 1 million barrels a day to 2.85 million barrels a day seven years.

Together with other nine deals awarded in two oil auctions, Iraq plans to pump about 12 million barrels a day in six to seven years that's of course is based on the IOCs pledges.

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Poor Iraqis!

Do you want to know how desperate the Iraqis are? And how they evaluate their government's performance? read today's UN IRINnews story on the new partnership between the World Food Program (WFP) and Iraq's Ministry of Trade to improve the state-run food aid system.

Here are some of these quotes:

-Omar Khalid Al-Jabouri, a 43-year-old video games shop owner from Jihad, a suburb of western Baghdad: “Finally we’ve got someone who will help us.”

-Kholoud Mohammed Amin, a 33-year-old hairdresser from New Baghdad, on the eastern side of the capital: “When it comes to the food rationing system, I prefer to leave it in the hands of WFP, from A to Z, because the Iraqi government has proved that it is unable to handle it properly.”

Poor Iraqis!

But folks, what about other problems in security, economy, education, heath, public services, environment...etc, can the UN and its bodies help?

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Did they agree or no?

Last Thursday, Iraqi Oil Ministry said that all international oil companies that are awarded multi-billion-dollar oil deals agreed to legal and technical changes to their contracts as the Cabinet requested and that they would be approved this week.

But on Sunday, the spokesman of the Iraqi government Ali Al-Dabbagh said the companies have not yet responded to government requests for amendments to the contracts, adding that only Angola's state oil company Sonangol, which has deals to develop to small oil fields Ninevah province, had accepted.

It is still unclear who tells the truth.

Some officials at the Cabinet say that the Ministers are growing frustrated with the Oil Ministry when it shrugged off more than 50 comments made by the Cabinet's legal committee on the contract that was awarded to BP and CNPC to develop Rumaila field from the first bidding round.

And that they have decided that they will not approve the second bidding round awarded deals unless the Ministry of Oil takes into considerations the comments on these deals before approval.

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