By Anthony DiPaola and Robert Tuttle
April 6 (Bloomberg) --Total SA and Chevron Corp. will bid together for oil development rights in Iraq as firms search for new crude supplies and the Middle Eastern country looks for investors to pump cash into its economy.
Iraq, holder of the world’s third-largest oil reserves, is running two bidding rounds to attract investors after six years of conflict and prior sanctions destroyed infrastructure. Last year it pre-qualified 35 international companies to take part in the sales and added nine more to the list this month.
“We are preparing our response to the first bidding round and we are together with Chevron,” Yves-Louis Darricarrere, Total’s president of exploration and production, told reporters in the Ras Laffan industrial city north of Doha today.
He declined to comment on whether Total, Europe’s third- largest oil company, had been invited by the Iraqi government to bid directly for the Nahr Bin Umar field, as reported by Reuters earlier. He declined to name the fields Total and Chevron, the second-biggest oil producer in the U.S., aimed to bid for.
Oil companies are set to submit bids for fields in the first round in June and the Iraqi government may decide on the winners in “days,” according to Ladislas Paszkiewicz, Total’s president of exploration and production in the Middle East. Iraq aims to award the field development rights by the end of June.
The Iraqi government is still working on the final contract model for the field developments, Darricarrere said. The government may give oil companies 75 percent stakes in the developments after a fall in oil prices cuts its own ability to invest, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in January.
The country aims to boost oil output to about 6 million barrels a day by 2015 from about 2.5 million barrels now as production ramps up after the license bidding rounds.
To contact the reporter on this story: Anthony DiPaola in Ras Laffan, Qatar at ; Robert Tuttle in Ras Laffan, Qatar at .