Iraqi Kurdistan's Gas Riches

At night, a reddish glare surrounds Basra in hydrocarbon-rich southern Iraq. Yet the city has electricity for just four hours a day; none at the night. The glare is the effect of “flaring”, or burning off, vast quantities of natural gas from the huge Rumaila, Zubair and West Qurna oil and natural gasfields.

Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq, is alight too, though not from the glare of natural gas burning, but because it has electricity 22 hours a day. This is no small matter but is a sign of the different fortunes of the natural gas industries in northern and southern Iraq, with significant implications for the Kurdistan region.

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