Drones and deadlock stymie Iraqi Kurdish oil and gas ambitions

Not for the first time, a foreign oil company-led project in Iraq’s Kurdistan region is dealing with the aftermath of a deadly drone attack

The 26 April drone strike on a condensate storage tank at the Khor Mor gas field, operated by the Pearl Petroleum consortium, killed four Yemeni contractors and forced a week-long outage of the 500mcf/d production. Although the UAE’s Dana Gas—which leads the consortium alongside Sharjah-headquartered Crescent Petroleum, Austria’s OMV, Germany’s RWEST and Hungary’s MOL Group—said production was back to normal levels by 3 May, the company acknowledged the incident may impact the completion schedule of a plan to boost production to 750mcf/d. It is also a blow to investor confidence, hitting one of the few successful gas developments in Iraq, responsible for generating more than 2,000MW of elect