Oil Search (OSH) Ltd., Papua New Guinea’s largest energy producer, will drill four wells at its oil discovery in Iraq’s Kurdistan region and aims to determine the size of the resource by the end of 2015.

“We’ve got a good asset in Kurdistan,” Managing Director Peter Botten said today in Perth, where he’s attending an industry conference. “We’re appraising it now. It will be toward the end of next year when we understand the resource base. Then we’ll decide where we go with it, what we do.”



Oil Search is moving ahead with drilling at its Taza oil project in Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq where the economy has boomed with oil exploration since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The company is also Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s partner in a $19 billion liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea scheduled to start this year.



Hawar Abdulrazaq
PNA -