After a decade of declining production, Syria has lifted its production of crude oil to 386,000 barrels a day (b/d) in 2010, up 2.4 per cent on its production in 2009, state-owned Syrian Arab News Agency (Sana) reports.

Production totalled 140.9 million barrels for the year, with Syrian Petroleum Company and its subsidiaries accounting for more than half the amount. Of this, 75.4 million barrels were exported by state-owned Syrian Company of Oil Transport.

Natural gas production totaled 10.1 billion cubic metres with a rate of 5.27 million cubic metres a day. Another 679 million cubic metres were imported from Egypt, via the Arab Gas Pipeline.

In 2010, Syria’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and the General Petroleum Corporation (GPC) launched a bid round for oil and gas exploration and development licences at eight onshore oil and gas blocks (MEED 16:7:10).  

According to UK oil major BP, at the end of 2009, Syria had 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil reserves. Syria already has a number of big international firms working in the country, including UK-Dutch major Shell, France’s Total and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). Damascus has signed 28 production sharing contracts with IOCs since 1977, accounting for 180,000 b/d, approximately 48 per cent of total oil production in the country.