SULAIMANI (ESTA) — A Turkish energy technical delegation and Iraqi oil officials met in Baghdad on Monday to discuss a resumption of Iraq’s northern oil exports, two oil officials told Reuters.
“We are discussing all technical aspects regarding the restarting of oil exports. A decision to resume flows will not happen today and more meetings are expected,” an oil official familiar with the meeting said on condition of anonymity.
Turkey halted Iraq’s 450,000 barrels per day (bpd) of northern exports through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline on March 25 after an arbitration ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).
Turkey wants to negotiate the size of damages it was ordered to pay in the arbitration ruling and also seeks clarification on other open arbitration cases, said another oil official.
Turkey’s decision to suspend exports followed an arbitration ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which ordered Turkey to pay Baghdad damages of $1.5 billion for unauthorised exports by the KRG between 2014 and 2018.
“A decision to restart oil flow needs political talks on higher levels. Issues blocking the resumption of oil exports are more political than technical,” said a second oil official.
Attempts to restart the pipeline were delayed by Turkey’s presidential elections last month and discussions between state-owned marketer SOMO and the KRG over an export deal, which has now been reached.
Hopes of a restart increased when Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan named Alparslan Bayraktar as energy minister on June 3 as part of his cabinet for his new five-year term.
The Reuters estimate that the Iraqi Kurdish region has lost more than $2 billion over the 80 days of the pipeline outage is based on exports of 375,000 barrels per day and the KRG’s historic discount against Brent crude.
The pipeline had also been exporting around 75,000 bpd of federal crude from Iraq’s Kirkuk oilfields.
