Gulf Keystone Petroleum Limited is an independent oil and gas exploration and production company that operates in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
[3][4] The company was founded by UAE, Kuwaiti and US private equity firms and has been registered[5] in Bermuda since 2001, with branch offices in Erbil, Kurdistan and London, UK.
The company owns production sharing contracts for one exploration block in Iraqi Kurdistan through its subsidiary, Gulf Keystone Petroleum International.
A small American company called Excalibur Ventures had initially drawn the attention of Texas Keystone to the possibility of acquiring exploration acreage in Kurdistan.
[12][2] Shaikan is an oilfield in Northern Iraq, in which Gulf Keystone Petroleum currently holds 75% of a production sharing agreement with the Kurdish Regional Government.
[6] On 24 June 2018, Gulf Keystone Petroleum said it had agreed with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Hungary's MOL to increase oil production capacity to 55,000 barrels per day (8,700 m3/d) in the following years.
[5] Initially independent estimates placed the gross oil-in-place (OIP) volume at 13.7 billion barrels (P50) potentially making it one of the largest oilfields discovered in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The former chief executive officer of Gulf Keystone explained to the market that the apparent reduction in the In Place oil at Shaikan was misleading.
Evidence[16] suggests that the Shaikan discovery is very substantial, and its significance is accentuated by the low success rate of wildcat exploration worldwide, which has been on a five to six-year downtrend.
The chief financial officer of Gulf Keystone indicated in March 2015 that the likely recovery rate from Shaikan was likely to be significantly above the 12% level implied by the auditors in 2014.
Further phases, which will be implemented in the coming years, have previously been said by Gulf Keystone to target a longer-term production level of 40,000 to 500,000 barrels of Shaikan crude oil per day.
In 2016, the Norwegian oil explorer DNO ASA announced that it had offered almost $300 million for heavily indebted UK rival Gulf Keystone Petroleum, because of its financial turmoil.
[18] An article appeared in The Independent on Sunday on 18 December 2011 suggesting that a number of major oil companies were potentially interested in Gulf Keystone's discovery.
[19] Its executive chairman, Todd Kozel, said "the one-time minnow's growth has been so extraordinary in the past two months that [it] would comfortably qualify for the FTSE 100 blue chip club ... We're not that little kid in short-pants anymore..." He claimed that the £3.5 billion market capitalization was due to the "world waking up" to the vast oil reserves the company possessed and "hoped that small private investors ... some of whom have risked their life-savings on GKP, would not be squeezed out by the big city firms".
[21] Subsequent to removing the threat posed by Excalibur and moving toward the achievement of the "Phase Zero" production level of 40,000 barrels per day of production,[12] disruption in the region caused by ISIS[22] and the difficulties experienced by the Kurdistan authorities in paying fully for the oil being exported by three Kurdistan operators including Genel as well as Gulf Keystone[23] continued to adversely affect market sentiment.