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The Kurdistan regional and Iraqi federal governments have reached a temporary agreement on the export of oil from the Kurdistan region. But a resolution could yet be blocked in Baghdad where oil policy is still going nowhere

On 5 February, Kuwait Energy Company (KEC) issued its Q4 2010 activities report announcing unaudited earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of $36.4m.

A $3bn deal to generate conventional and renewable power in Libya and export it to Europe is the latest project to capture the imagination of Abu Dhabi’s financial and business community

Leave aside for a moment the football politics, so often an opaque affair, and the disappointment of much larger and more established soccer-playing nations, whose hopes of hosting a World Cup were dashed by the Zurich-based Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the sport’s governing body. What does the success of Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 Fifa World Cup say about the nature of polities and geopolitics as the world remakes itself after a decade defined by the West’s unresolved interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and staggers to an end with European economies and the United States struggling to recover from the credit crunch?

Presentations by Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) energy resources minister Ashti Hawrami are always technically impressive. Under his leadership, the KRG has “focused strategy to maximise investment in as short a time as possible”, he told CWC’s Iraq Petroleum conference in London.

The international upstream arm of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) has a mandate to increase its reserves and production mainly through acquisitions across Africa and elsewhere. Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (Kufpec) senior international business analyst Shayma Abdullah Amin told GSN on 30 November in Marrakech that it was looking for “development and producing assets.

Uncertainty over Kurdistan’s production-sharing agreements as the weakness of its negotiating position is exposed in process of government formation

Syria plans to launch its delayed offshore licensing for oil and gas contracts in 2011. The round, which was due this year, was announced by oil minister Sufian Alao at the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries in Damascus on 22 November.

The joint venture between Qatar Telecom (QTel) and Tunisia’s Princesse El-Materi Holding, which is trying to buy Orascom Telecom Holding’s 50% stake in Telecom Tunisie (Tunisiana), reflects Qatar’s skill at making deals with North African ruling elites.

Water and electricity minister Abdullah Al-Hussayen has said that construction

Canada’s denial of extra landing rights for United Arab Emirates national carriers Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways after five years of negotiations has strained relations. The UAE responded in October by forcing Canada to close a military base in Dubai that was part of a key supply route to Afghanistan, denying a plane carrying Canadian defence minister Peter MacKay, who was flying from Afghanistan, airspace over the UAE and causing it to take a long detour.

Questions are being asked about why the Aden Container Terminal (ACT) has been left behind while Adenites watch the development of nearby ports such as Djibouti and Oman’s Salalah facility.

The Saudi authorities have convinced all four foreign ventures to continue drilling for gas in the Rub Al-Khali (Empty Quarter) until at least 2012, despite mainly disappointing results from the 26 wells drilled so far, industry publication Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW) reported.

Government and company officials used the early November Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (Adipec) to emphasise that plans to raise crude output to 3.5m b/d by 2017 (from 2.8m b/d now) have moved forward with orders for several major onshore and offshore projects.

Another US company has signed up for exploration acreage in the Kurdistan Regional Government region, following Marathon Oil Corporation’s deal in October which made it the first publicly traded US company to operate in the KRG zone (GSN 888/10). El Dorado, Arkansas-based Murphy Oil Corporation has been awarded a 50% operating interest in the 619km2 Central Dohuk Block, near the Turkish border. The acreage is “on trend with recent exploration drilling”, chief executive David Wood told a Q3 10 earnings call.