Royal Dutch Shell has sold its 20-percent stake in Iraq’s West Qurna-1 oil field to Japan’s Itochu Corporation, and Iraq has approved the transaction, a senior Iraqi oil official told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. “Shell sold its stake in West Qurna 1 to Itochu and the oil ministry approved it. We met with Itochu and discussed the required financial investments and operations at the field,” Ihsan Abdul Jabbar, the head of Iraq’s state-run Basra Oil Company (BOC), told Reuters. The operator and lead contractor at the West Qurna-1 oil field is ExxonMobil, which had agreed in 2010 to rehabilitate the field together with its co-venturers the Oil Exploration Company of Iraq and Shell’s affiliate, Shell West Qurna BV. In September last year, Shell said that it was in the process of selling its stake in West Qurna-1. Shell has also said that it wants out of the […]