Iraq resumed crude exports from the autonomous Kurdistan region on Saturday after a more than two-year halt over legal and technical disputes.
Control over lucrative oil exports has been a major point of contention between Baghdad and Arbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, with a key pipeline to Turkey shut since 2023.
Iraq’s oil ministry announced the “resumption of oil exports from the Kurdistan Region through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline”, ending the long-standing hiatus in the energy-rich region.
The director of Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO), Ali Nizar, told AFP that SOMO would receive 190,000 barrels per day for export and another 50,000 a day for domestic consumption.
Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Batraktar confirmed on X that oil began to flow through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline early Saturday morning.
Oil exports were previously independently sold by the Kurdish authorities without the approval or oversight of the federal government in Baghdad through the port of Ceyhan in Turkey.
But the region’s official oil exports have been frozen since March 2023, when the arbitration tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris ruled oil exports by the regional government were illegal and said Baghdad had the exclusive right to market all Iraqi oil.
In July, Baghdad and Arbil had agreed that the Kurdistan region would resume delivering all oil produced in the region’s fields to SOMO for export.
On Thursday, the federal and Kurdish authorities reached another deal with international oil companies operating in the autonomous region to resume crude exports.
– ‘Facilitated’ by Washington –
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday the tripartite deal was “facilitated” by Washington, and that it would “strengthen the mutually beneficial economic partnership between the United States and Iraq”.
The Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR), which represents international oil firms in the region, estimated the losses to Iraq since the pipeline closed to be more than $35 billion.
On Wednesday, eight international oil companies operating in Kurdistan said they agreed to resume exports via the Iraq-Turkey pipeline.
The deal stipulates that the companies meet with the Kurdish authorities within 30 days of resuming exports “to work towards creating a mechanism for settling the outstanding debts” owed to the firms.
The Kurdistan region is in arrears to the tune of $1 billion to oil companies for production expenses.
The Norwegian group DNO ASA announced it was not joining the deal, saying that resuming exports should be “pursuant to agreements that ensure payment surety”.
Iraq is a founding member of the OPEC cartel, and crude oil sales make up 90 percent of the country’s revenues.
It currently exports 3.4 million barrels per day, according to the official INA press agency, citing a SOMO official.
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© Agence France-Presse
