Basrah Gas Company
Iraq's Ministry of Oil put the southern gas infrastructure of its South Gas Company into a 25-year joint venture with Shell and Mitsubishi, with the state holding 51 percent, and from May 2013 the venture gathered and processed associated gas that the Rumaila, West Qurna 1 and Zubair oil fields had flared, reaching a raw gas processing capacity of 1 billion standard cubic feet per day by 2019.
1 billion standard cubic feet per day, bgc raw gas processing capacity, 2019-10. 70 million tons CO2e, greenhouse gas emissions prevented by bgc since inception, 2013 to 2018, 2018. International Finance Corporation, Summary of Investment Information, Basrah Gas Co (project 39146), retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
The Ministry of Oil transferred South Gas Company's existing southern gas assets into a joint venture in which the state kept majority ownership and an international operator brought capital and operating capability, and the venture sold dry gas into the national grid and LPG to the domestic market under a fixed 25-year term.
Preconditions
- Existing state gas plants and pipelines that a venture could take over and rehabilitate
- Oil fields under service contracts whose associated gas had no other buyer
- A domestic power sector short of fuel, which gave the captured gas a national buyer
Limits: Both numbers are sponsor information that IFC republished: the disclosure states that IFC has not necessarily verified the project information independently. The capacity figure is installed processing capacity in 2019, not gas actually captured, and the disclosure gives no flared volume, so it cannot show what share of the associated gas the venture captured or how much is still flared. The second number comes from the IFC Environmental and Social Review Summary for the same project (https://disclosuresservice.ifc.org/api/ProjectAccess/ESRSProject?projectId=39146), not from the investment summary, and an avoided-emissions figure rests on a counterfactual the company chose. Both URLs return JSON from IFC's disclosure service; the human-readable page at disclosures.ifc.org renders the same text with JavaScript. The case is one concession in one province, so it shows that the state can run one large joint venture, not how often it does so. The disclosure dates from 2019 and the record cannot show whether the planned expansion to 1.4 billion cubic feet per day by 2024 was delivered. The processing plants at North Rumaila and Khor Al Zubair date from the early 1980s, so part of the capacity is rehabilitated state infrastructure, not new private build.