Iraq invites Turkey to resume oil exports from Kurdistan region: official
Shafaq News/ Iraq's state oil marketer, SOMO, has formally invited Turkey to resume oil exports from Kurdistan, the region's ministry of natural resources said in a press release on Thursday.
This announcement followed an agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Federal Government of Iraq regarding the region's oil portfolio.
"After reaching an accord between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi Federal Government pertaining to the region's oil dossier, the requisite procedures to recommence oil exports have been finalized," the press release said.
"on May 10th, SOMO officially solicited the Turkish side to initiate oil exports via the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline," it added.
The statement underscored that both, the regional ministry of natural resources and the federal ministry of oil are awaiting Turkey's response to SOMO's request.
Crude exports from the semiautonomous Kurdistan region have been suspended since late March, caught up in a dispute between Turkey and Iraq over exports by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). With the pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, the only viable outlet for the region's crude, storage quickly filled and fields were shut in. Iraq's state-owned marketing firm said this week that the country's crude production fell by 360,000 b/d because of the northern impasse.
The shutdown appeared to affect regional production in the first quarter, even though it began only a week before the end of the period.
Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) signed a temporary agreement on April 4 to restart oil exports to Turkey, but the implementation was delayed as the two needed to iron out some aspects of the deal.
