Northern Iraq's reserves put oil majors in a quandary - The National

"One more," says Eric Ailland, as he flicks a stone into the gleaming black pool.

It is sucked in without a splash, which is enough to reassure the French engineer that the dark stuff seeping to the surface in this field in Iraqi Kurdistan is oil.

For years Kurdish villagers have brought their sheep here to graze, sometimes also filling a jerrycan or two with oil. But this picturesque land of soft green and yellow hills edged by slate-blue mountains has now become the centre of a race for resources between the world's oil majors, which believe Iraqi Kurdistan could hold as much as Libya's 45 billion barrels of reserves in massive reservoirs like the Tawke field.

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