Wildcatters Plunge Into North Iraq - WSJ.com

Wildcatters Plunge Into North Iraq - WSJ.com: "Wildcatters Plunge Into North Iraq
'Easy Oil' in Kurdistan Spurs Westerners to Brave the Risks
By NEIL KING JR.
July 9, 2008

TAWKE, Iraq -- The Canadians are squeezing oil from sand. The Brazilians want to nurse it up through miles of seawater, sandstone and salt. But here in the far north of Iraq, oil is literally bubbling to the surface.

Oil executives lament that the age of 'easy oil' is over. It isn't over here. For companies that have stumbled into this corner of Iraq known as Kurdistan, it's an era that has just begun.

'Look at this,' said Magne Normann, Middle East director for DNO International ASA of Norway, as he stood beside a pond of oil oozing up on a hillside. For fun, he heaved in a stone. 'What a sight,' he said, as the liquid shot three feet high. 'Pure oil.'
[Oil photo]
Neil King
Mr. Normann admires one of the many natural oil seeps near the village of Tawke.

Iraq is well known as one of the planet's last great oil repositories, with more than 115 billion barrels of reserves, by most estimates. The surprise is how much oil -- and easily accessible oil -- there appears to be in Iraq's Kurdish region, a rugged, Switzerland-size area that has seen centuries of conflict but essentially no oil exploration, until now.

One of the"