Baghdad courts KBR for gas capture push

Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs Mohsen al-Mandalawi met a KBR delegation on October 22 to discuss upstream and gas development, state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.

The KBR team was led by Jay Ibrahim, the company’s president for sustainable technology solutions. According to the statement cited by INA, talks centred on scope for joint work across oil, gas and power, and on how the contractor’s technical capabilities might be deployed to upgrade infrastructure and lift the performance of strategic projects.

Associated gas recovery featured prominently in the exchange, alongside field development, production efficiency gains and the modernisation of ageing oil facilities. Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, continues to flare volumes that would otherwise displace imported Iranian gas feeding its power sector, a long-standing drag on fiscal and strategic planning.

Both sides also examined how KBR’s proprietary technologies could be brought to bear on project execution, with an emphasis on cost discipline, quality standards and financial sustainability – criteria the ministry has increasingly foregrounded as it reviews contractor shortlists.

Al-Mandalawi used the meeting to underline the need for closer coordination between Iraqi authorities in mapping out areas where foreign expertise can be slotted into existing workstreams.

He flagged four priority baskets where Baghdad wants bankable programmes: the Majnoon oilfield, associated gas capture at West Qurna, ammonia production initiatives, and broader flare-reduction schemes across the southern fields. Majnoon, operated by state-owned Basra Oil Co. (BOC) since the exit of Royal Dutch Shell, has been the subject of successive redevelopment studies, while West Qurna hosts phases operated by ExxonMobil’s successor PetroChina and Russia’s Lukoil.

Flaring remains the central embarrassment of Iraq’s downstream-adjacent economy. The country routinely vents more than 1 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of associated gas, and successive governments have pledged to end the practice, most recently targeting the end of the decade.

KBR, headquartered in Houston, has a long track record in ammonia and fertiliser technology licensing as well as in hydrocarbons engineering, which positions it for both the gas-processing and petrochemical strands flagged by al-Mandalawi.

No commercial terms, project values or timelines were disclosed in the INA readout, and neither side indicated when follow-up technical discussions would take place. The meeting is the latest in a sequence of engagements between Baghdad and US service majors as the oil ministry seeks to translate framework-level interest into firm engineering mandates.