Our Middle East team continuously examine Iraq’s complex energy market developments to provide our clients with unique and independent insights, analysis and analytics on the country’s crude, oil products, gas, and power sectors.
Iraq has been a key contributor to OPEC liquids growth, with the country having added 300,000 b/d year-on-year to its production capacity from 2010-15 and almost 900,000 b/d in total during the 2017-22 period, although the nation has since had to cut back on production due to a combination of the northern pipeline outage and OPEC+ cuts.
Over the next decade, Iraq’s upstream development will prove both more costly and complex. Beyond the need to manage the transition from primary to secondary oil recovery - increasing the need for water injection schemes - operators face a host of challenges: a greater focus on gas treatment projects, degassing station upgrades, addressing midstream infrastructure bottlenecks and managing relations with Iraq’s political machinery.
At the same time, the country is slowly but surely expanding its gas supply through new upstream and flare gas recovery projects. In parallel, Iraq is working on its power sector to expand generation and transmission capacities from both fossil fuel based and renewable sources. Meanwhile existing and prospects gas and power trade deals are contributing to a major part of the energy balance in the years ahead.
On the data side, we cover Iraq’s crude oil production and exports, oil product balances and imports/exports (LPG, Naphtha, Gasoline, Jet/Kero, Diesel/Gasoil, Fuel Oil), crude oil prices (Basrah Medium – Asia, US, Europe; Basrah Heavy – Asia, US, Europe; Kirkuk - US, Europe), natural gas balances (supply, demand, and imports), as well as power generation and fuel mix (in power sector).