The official handover of the lead operator role on one of the world’s biggest oil fields – West Qurna 1 – from the U.S.’s ExxonMobil to China’s PetroChina was completed last week.
However, unofficially China took control of the supergiant oil field from the moment at the end of June 2018 that ExxonMobil broke off talks with the Iraqi government about it being the lead partner in the country’s Common Seawater Supply Project CSSP and began a strategic withdrawal from all Iraq energy projects, as did other Western energy firms. Chinese and Russian firms were happy to step into the project voids created. As a very high-ranking official from the Kremlin said recently at a meeting with senior government figures from Iran “By keeping the West out of energy deals in Iraq the end of Western hegemony in the Middle East will become the decisive chapter in the West’s final demise,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union’s energy security apparatus exclusively told OilPrice.com