Chinese company completes power facility in Iraq

A Chinese company has completed a major power station in Iraq, the first such facility built in the Arab country since the Gulf war. The gas-powered 222-MW station, near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, is expected to ease a chronic electricity shortage in a country where blackouts last summer often lasted more than 12 hours in a day.
The plant was inaugurated on Oct. 26 and cost $ 75 mm, Xiang Jun of the Chinese National Machinery and Equipment Import and Export company told. The company is also supplying spare parts to revamp power stations hit during the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, he said. Hundreds of Chinese engineers, he said, are rehabilitating a major electricity plant near Najaf in southern Iraq.
The company is among more than 1,500 companies taking part in the Baghdad International Fair in which 45 countries are represented. It is one of 12 major Chinese firms exhibiting products.
Wang Shuang Xin, the Chinese commercial attache in Baghdad, said China's efforts to reconstruct Iraq's devastated infrastructure fall within UN rules governing foreign trade with the country. Iraq is under UN trade sanctions for invading Kuwait in 1990, but it is allowed to sell as much oil as it can and use the proceeds to buy food, medicine and other urgently needed goods.

Chinese exports to Iraq last year were valued at more than $ 500 mm. Xiang said his company also recently signed a $ 200 mm contract for construction of the first phase of a new 1,200 MW power plant in Samarra, 75 miles north of Baghdad and is waiting for UN approval to start work.
Iraq says it needs up to 10,000 MW to meet domestic demand but only 4,200 MW are supplied. It says it will take years to make up for the shortfall at the present rate of repairs and installation of new parts. Iraq has allocated $ 3 bn from its oil revenues for buying spare parts, turbines and generators.