In Iraq, oil is literally bubbling to the surface  

Neil King at the WSJ has an article on wild frontier of Iraqi oil exploration in Kurdistan - Wildcatters Plung Into North Iraq. No doubt they'll find lots of the stuff.

The Canadians are squeezing oil from sand. The Brazilians want to nurse it up through miles of seawater, sandstone and salt. But here in the far north of Iraq, oil is literally bubbling to the surface.

Oil executives lament that the age of "easy oil" is over. It isn't over here. For companies that have stumbled into this corner of Iraq known as Kurdistan, it's an era that has just begun. "Look at this," said Magne Normann, Middle East director for DNO International ASA of Norway, as he stood beside a pond of oil oozing up on a hillside. For fun, he heaved in a stone. "What a sight," he said, as the liquid shot three feet high. "Pure oil."

Iraq is well known as one of the planet's last great oil repositories, with more than 115 billion barrels of reserves, by most estimates. The surprise is how much oil -- and easily accessible oil -- there appears to be in Iraq's Kurdish region, a rugged, Switzerland-size area that has seen centuries of conflict but essentially no oil exploration, until now.

One of the world's most prolific oil fields, the Kirkuk field, sprawls for more than 70 miles just to the southwest of the Kurdish region's border. After 74 years in production, it still churns out over 400,000 barrels a day. Dozens of similar geological structures extend far to the north in Kurdistan, undrilled and almost entirely unexamined.

"I am not expecting to find another Kirkuk," says Ashti Hawrami, Kurdistan's plain-talking minister of natural resources. "But I think we will find a lot of fields that add up to Kirkuk."

The hubbub is in sharp contrast to the rest of Iraq, where an exploratory well hasn't been drilled in 15 years, thanks to neglect throughout the Iran-Iraq war, the period of international sanctions and then the war that began in 2003. Major oil companies have entered talks with Baghdad over ways to boost output in the huge fields in Iraq's south. But the Iraqi government remains loath to grant outsiders the right to explore for new oil or to share in the profits. ...

Companies signing deals under the Kurds' law have since been barred by Baghdad from doing business in the rest of Iraq, where the biggest of the country's oil fields lie. That threat is keeping the major oil companies out of Kurdistan, despite their ardor for new terrain to drill. Meanwhile, until Iraqis can agree on a national oil law, the companies drilling in Kurdistan have no way to export oil they unearth.