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Iraq is unveiling the foreign firms that have won contracts to develop key oil and gas fields - with Britain's BP and China's CNPC International taking the largest contract.

Baghdad's oil ministry said BP and CNPC won the rights to work in the huge Rumaila field, which is in the south of the country and has known reserves of 17.7 billion barrels.

It is the largest of six fields on offer to foreign and large state-owned companies invited to invest in conflict-hit Iraq's energy sector.

The deals will provide the Iraqi government with much-needed revenue, as it struggles to rebuild after three wars and more than a decade of debilitating economic sanctions.

But Chinese oil firms CNOOC and Sinopec and the US energy giant ConocoPhillips reportedly rejected terms to work in two separate oil fields.

CNOOC and Sinopec were asked to pay $25.4 per barrel extracted from the Maysan oil field but the companies bid only 2.3 dpb.

ConocoPhillips, meanwhile, offered $4 per barrel to work in the Bai Hassan oil field but the Iraqi government wanted 26.7 dpb.

All three companies subsequently withdrew their offers.

Sky's foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall said: "Now it (the Iraqi oil industry) is set to rocket.

"(The oil firms) are not getting all the oil, they're getting the contracts to bring it out of the ground - to make enormous profits, no doubt, and so will, theoretically, the Iraqi state.

"They need the expertise of the outside world... it's supposed to be a win-win situation."

"These contracts are needed for the reconstruction of Iraq," Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki said at the opening of the bidding session in Baghdad.

"They are for the benefit of Iraqis and the companies."

The chance to develop the oil fields and two gas fields attracted bids from 31 firms, including US and European giants ExxonMobil and Shell.

A swathe of Asian companies from China, India, South Korea and Indonesia also entered the auction.

The oil deposits, holding known reserves of 43 billion barrels of crude, are in southern and northern Iraq, while the gas concessions are west and north east of Baghdad.

"Our principal objective is to increase our oil production from 2.4 million barrels per day to more than four million in the next five years," Oil Minister Hussein al Shahristani said.

Increasing production to that level will, according to him, pump an extra £1 trillion into government coffers over the next 20 years.

Mr Shahristani has said that only £18bn of that sum will go to the companies that have extracted the oil.

For energy firms, the appeal is the opportunity to plant a foot in the country, their first chance to do so since the Baath party nationalised the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1972, seven years before Saddam took power.