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

Also in this section
1 August 2025
A number of companies have filed arbitration claims against Gazprom over non-deliveries of contracted gas or other matters—and won. The next step is to collect the award; this is no easy task but it can be done thanks to an international legal framework under the New York Convention.
1 August 2025
Europe’s refining sector is desperately trying to adapt to a shifting global energy landscape and nowhere is this more apparent than in its largest economy
1 August 2025
The Middle East natural gas playbook is being rewritten. The fuel source offers the region a pathway to a cleaner, sustainable and affordable means of local power, to fasttrack economic development and as a lucrative opportunity to better monetise its energy resources.
31 July 2025
TotalEnergies is an outlier among other majors for remaining committed to low-carbon investments while continuing to replenish and expand its ample oil and gas portfolio, with an appetite for high risk/high return projects.