Six years after a draft law was put forward to cancel a production-sharing agreement for oil exploration with the Canadian company Ammonite Energy, in the Al-Jafr region, the bill was re-included in the extraordinary session of the National Assembly, which will begin its work next Sunday.

The reasons for canceling the agreement are due to its statute of limitations without implementing its provisions, especially due to the decrease in crude oil to a third, then half, of its average price when it was signed in 2010.

In that year, the price of crude was around $100 a barrel, according to Bahjat Al-Adwan, Director of the Projects Directorate at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.

The scope of the agreement with the Canadian Exploration Company was supposed to cover 17,420 square kilometers, in the Al-Jafr area.

Five years later, in 2015, the government and the company signed a production sharing agreement according to a special law, after the company expressed a desire to do so, according to its study.

However, oil prices fell below $30 a barrel, and the company refrained from implementing the terms of the agreement, although it was granted opportunities for two years.

As a result of the company’s refusal to respond, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources decided to proceed with the procedures for terminating the agreement and canceling the special law according to which it was issued.

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