Iraq wants to open a special border crossing with Kuwait for international oil firms working in Iraq, the head of state-run South Oil Company (SOC) said.

The border point will facilitate the inflow of equipment for the oil companies that secured contracts to develop Iraq's oilfields, after complaints about the capacity of the country's ports, SOC head Dhiya Jaafar was quoted as saying in our sister publication, the Gulf Daily News.

"There are repeated complaints from the international oil companies, which won contracts in the bidding rounds" about the work of the Iraqi ports, he said. "A solution that has been put forward is to set up a border point with Kuwait in Northern Rumaila related to the oil companies."

Jaafar said the proposal is being studied by Iraq's oil, finance and interior ministries but also needs the approval of the Kuwaiti government.

Relations with Kuwait remain frosty two decades after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq's small neighbour.

Rumaila oilfield, the workhorse of Iraq's oil sector and which is now being developed by oil major BP and China's CNPC into what could be the world's second most productive field, lies along Iraq's border with Kuwait.

Iraq, in desperate need of cash to rebuild after years of war, economic sanctions and underinvestment, has opened its oil reserves and some untapped fields to global oil companies.

It struck major deals in two auctions in a bid to raise its production capacity to Saudi Arabian level of 12 million bpd in seven years from 2.5 million bpd now.

Jaafar also said the SOC is building a processing plant - which separates oil from water and gas contaminants - in the small Tuba oilfield, with a capacity of 50,000 bpd.

SOC plans to drill five new wells to raise output from the southern oilfield, for which Asian firms had negotiated development agreements with Saddam's regime before it was toppled in the 2003 US-led invasion.

SOC is building a new processor plant in the Nahr bin Omar supergiant oilfield, Jaafar added. – TradeArabia News Service