http://biyokulule.com/view_content.php?articleid=4581
Paydirt = oil traces, like those found in PL, and so far we're on the good Kurdistani track. ^The first 10 wells drilled hit paydirt.
The foreigners in Kurdistan sound like the new folks arriving in PL cities lately. ^Today, Kurdistan is in the grip of an old-fashioned oil boom. Planes flying into a gleaming new airport in Erbil, the capital, are full of foreign chatter: Texan drawl, Chinese staccato, the flat vowels of Yorkshire. They swap stories of gushers found and fortunes made.
Look at those amazing changes. ^Five-star hotels are rising from building-site lots that only recently were little more than disused scrubland. Electricity runs virtually 24 hours a day, when five years ago the city was lucky to squeeze out a few hours from its dilapidated network. Baghdad still only gets by on four hours of power a day. And it`s peaceful.
In the 80s, Conoco said that Garowe-Las Anod alone could produce more than that amount...imagine $1 Billion a month for PL's economy. ^Today it churns out 250,000 barrels a day. With oil selling for over $120 a barrel, that equates to $900m a month..."
Sound familiar? ^The floodgates opened the next year when the new constitution that laid the framework for a federal Iraq granted semi-autonomy to the Kurds, which, the Kurds argue, included the authority to sign exploration deals directly with companies, rather than doing it through the federal ministry in Baghdad. More than 40 companies signed up...
