Output dream is reaching for the sky

By Nassir Shirkhani Erbil

 17 January 2013 06:34 GMT

Iraqi Kurdistan’s dream of joining the ranks of major oil exporters by pumping 2 million barrels per day by the end of the decade looks increasingly out of reach, amid deteriorating relations with the central government and a dearth of recent exploration success.

Buoyed by a wave of initial exploration discoveries by first movers such as Norway’s DNO and London-listed Gulf Keystone ­Petroleum and Genel Energy, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) set itself a goal of pumping a million bpd in 2015, and doubling that thereafter.

“We have the potential to export 250,000 to 300,000 bpd of oil,” KRG’s Oil Minister Ashti Hawrami said in late 2012.

“We believe that by 2015 we will safely reach a million bpd and by 2019, 2 million bpd.’’

Hawrami is a supremely confident executive, whose smooth talk — allied to…

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