Kareem Yasser Hashem, the director of oilfields in the Iraqi province of Thi-Qar has said a Malaysian-Japanese consortium has started developing the al-Gharraf oilfield it had obtained during the second round of oil licensing, Aswat al-Iraq has reported. Last Janurary, Malaysia's Petronas and Japan's Japex has jointly been awarded the licence to develop the oilfield, one of five key oilfields in the province whose combined reserves are up to 12 billion barrels. Gharraf alone is estimated to contain 3 billion barrels.