Kurdistan oil and its impact on kurdistan environment — Overview

Kurdistan region of Iraq with more than 45 billion barrels of reserved oil and 200 trillion cubic feet of reserved natural gas is considered as one of the richest area with oil and gas in the world. After 2003 specially after the approval of the Iraqi constitution and issuance of the law of oil and gas from the Kurdistan Parliament, the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) gave the territory of the patent to extract oil for many international companies and a part of these companies actually started to produce oil for example DNO and GENEL that started production of oil from Tawke field, Genel Energy and Addax from Taq Taq field, Gulf Keystone from Shaikan field and KAR Oil & Gas from Khurmala field. The industry in general and oil industries in particular are activities that negatively affect the environment and cause various environmental problems. Oil consists of at least (300) different chemicals, most of them negatively affecting the health or living organisms. Direct effects that caused by activities related to the oil industry, (search and exploration, oil extraction, oil transportation and oil refining), can be summarized in polluting the environment of Kurdistan, negative change of natural Landscape and Exhaustion of Kurdistan natural resources. The activities related to the oil industry cause pollution of the environment of Kurdistan as a result of (i) chemicals used in oil extraction, (ii) oil that is spilled on land, (iii) The combustion of crude oil which leads to emission of many highly toxic gases and release of some toxic metal elements and (iiii) Pollution from oil transport accidents of crude oil by pipelines and oil tankers.