London : Royal Dutch Shell plans to raise oil production from Iraq's supergiant Majnoon oilfield to 175,000 barrels a day by the end of 2012, a company executive said Wednesday.
Shell, which partnered Malaysia's state-run Petronas to develop Majnoon, this year has raised production from the field to 65,000 barrels a day from 40,000 barrels a day, the executive told Dow Jones Newswires on the sidelines of an Iraq petroleum conference being held in London.
The Anglo-Dutch major also signed last week in Basra in southern Iraq a deal with Halliburton of the US and the state-run Iraqi Drilling Co a contract to drill 15 wells in the 12.8 billion barrel field.
"Drilling is expected to start in March next year," the executive said. He gave no figure of the value of the deal.
In August, a senior Iraqi oil official said that Shell and Petronas had also awarded UK-based oil and gas services company Petrofac Ltd an engineering, procurement and construction contract to build two crude-oil processing plants, each with a 50,000 barrel-a-day capacity. The project has yet to be signed officially, people familiar with the matter said.
