Norway’s DNO is on track to raise crude production by a third at the Tawke field in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq to 100,000 barrels a day (b/d) by the end of 2012 and 200,000 by 2015.

DNO is currently producing 70,000 b/d and is on schedule to meet its 31 December deadline to increase IT to 100,000 b/d, according to Dave Henson, DNO’s project manager in the Kurdish region, speaking at the MEED Brownfield Projects 2012 conference in Abu Dhabi on 10 December.

Aberdeen-based Wood Group PSN was awarded a contract by DNO to provide engineering support for the expansion of production at the field. The contract, awarded in November, is Wood Group PSN’s first in Iraq and covers engineering studies, detailed design, as well as technical and operations support. A team of 30 engineers has been assigned to the project.

DNO also hopes to ramp production up by another 100,000 b/d by the end of 2014 at a cost of around $100m.

The next phase of development will deal with water produced from the field’s ageing wells. “Traditionally we would have hired Wood Group to do the planning, but we have problems with getting contractors into Kurdistan. So we are going to buy a complete system built on skids,” says Hanson.

“Wood Group PSN will work out the input and output criteria and we will leave the innards to the contractors. This will save time by not have to place individual procurement tenders and other packages”.

The selected contractor will provide the neccessary equipment, which will be commissioned in Dubai and shipped to Kurdistan for assembly.

DNO is the operator of the Tawke field, with a 55 per cent stake. The UK/Turkish joint venture Genel Energy has a 25 per cent stake and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) holds the remaining 20 per cent of the production-sharing agreement, which was signed in 2004.

The field contains an estimated 771 million barrels of recoverable reserves. The increase will be part of a wider plan by the KRG to increase the region’s production from the three northern provinces of Iraq to 2 million b/d by 2020, compared with less than 300,000 b/d in mid-2012.

Delegates at the conference say there is mounting excitement about oil industry prospects in northern Iraq. In contrast, interest of international oil companies working on major projects in other parts of Iraq is waning.