When the Assad regime’s decades-long hold over Syria collapsed last December to be replaced by a new Sunni Islamist regime backed by the west, Syria’s energy sector drew interest from within and outside the region. Despite conspiracy theories claiming that the country’s 14-year (and arguably now reigniting) civil war was ‘actually’ over secret pipeline routes or its ‘vast’ oil reserves, the truth is that even before the civil war, Syria’s oil and gas made for slim pickings. Syria’s oil production was in steep decline and the energy sector was stagnating due to lack of investment.
After peaking at 600,000 b/d in the mid-1990s, crude output fell to just 386,000 b/d in 2010. Total (as it was then known) and Shell – the country’s only two western majors – suffered production losses at their respective Deir Ezzor and Al-Furat licenses from the maturing fields on the banks of the Euphrates that had been pumping out oil for decades (MEES, 16 May). Syria was hardly a capex candidate for either firm: Greenfield development, LNG, and unconventional exploration offered far more intriguing opportunities globally in the early 2010s – certainly more than in the dying oil fields in a country led by an increasingly despotic leader. The events post-2011 proved this to be a prescient choice. (CONTINUED - 1289 WORDS)
