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Baghdad hopes to resume Kurdish oil exports within week: minister
Baghdad, Feb 17 (AFP) Feb 17, 2025
Iraq's oil minister said Monday that crude exports from the autonomous Kurdistan region to Turkey should resume within a week, ending two years of wrangling.

Oil exports have been a major point of tension between Baghdad and Arbil, with a major pipeline through Turkey shut since 2023 over legal disputes and technical issues.

"We have agreed" with the autonomous region to receive at least 300,000 barrels per day "to export through the Turkish port of Ceyhan," Oil Minister Hayan Abdel Ghani told journalists.

A delegation from Baghdad would head to Arbil on Tuesday to "set up a mechanism to receive and export the oil," Abdel Ghani said.

Exports were expected to resume "within a week", he added.

Oil exports were previously independently sold by the Kurdistan region, without the approval or oversight of the central administration in Baghdad, through the port of Ceyhan.

But the region's oil exports have been at a standstill since March 2023 when the arbitration tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris ruled oil exports by the regional government illegal.

In its judgement in a case first lodged in 2014, the tribunal ruled that the federal government had the exclusive right to market all Iraqi oil, halting the region's independent exports by pipeline via Turkey.

The federal and regional governments have been haggling ever since over the production and transport costs payable to the region and its commercial partners.

But in a recent budget amendment, Baghdad agreed to form an independent body to set the cost payments and to pay $16 a barrel in the meantime.

The Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan, which represents international oil firms operating in the region, put losses to all parties since the export pipeline closed at $20 billion.


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