Taq Taq oil field

The Taq Taq field, lying in the Zagros basin within the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, has gross 2P reserves of 647 million barrels. However Genel Energy believes that the field could potentially hold one billion barrels of oil.

The license area is located 60 kilometres (km) north-east of the Kirkuk oil field and adjacent to the city of Kirkuk, 85 km south-east of the city of Erbil and 120 km north-west of the city of Sulaimaniyah. Its gross area is approximately 951 square km.

Through 2012 wells at the site had to be sporadically shut-down as exports stopped as a result of export disputes between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad.

Contract Negotiations
In 2005 a production sharing contract (PSC) was signed for the development of the Taq Taq field between the KRG, Genel Energy and Addax Petroleum (a subsidiary of Sinopec). Genel holds a 55% stake in the contract and Addax 45%.

Production and Export
The companies operating at Taq Taq began producing oil in 2009 at an initial level of 40,000 barrels per day (bpd).

According to Reuters, as of September 2012 the field was pumping 105,000 bpd, with 55,000 bpd delivered by tanker truck to Khurmala for export via the government-controlled Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. Of the remainder, around 35,000 bpd was trucked to the nearby Bazian refinery and the rest stored. Head of operations at the site, Joe Stein, said exports could be boosted to 70,000 bpd if needed. However Genel's official website states the production capacity of the field is 120,000 bpd and that the company hoped to increase this to 200,000 bpd by 2014.

According to Genel, the main obstacle to increasing the level of production in 2012 was the infrastructure bottleneck and current truck transportation, however noting that the KRG was planning a new pipeline to transport produced oil to the Turkish border.

Taq Taq produces what has been dubbed "champagne quality" crude, due to its very light API gravity of 48°.

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