International oil companies operating in Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan will not produce oil for pipeline exports until the issue of overdue payments estimated at nearly $1 billion is resolved, Norway’s DNO DNO.OL said.
Turkey’s closure of the Iraq-Turkey pipeline in March has collectively cost Iraq, Kurdistan’s Regional Government (KRG) and oil producers a total of $7 billion in lost export revenues, the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR), has previously said.
Members of APIKUR would not restart pipeline exports until “it is clear how they will be paid for their contractual entitlements of oil already sold and delivered for exports and for future sales of such oil for exports”, DNO, one of APIKUR’s six members, said.
The accumulated KRG debt to DNO for previous oil sales in 2022 and 2023 stood in excess of $300 million, the company said.
Other APIKUR members are Genel Energy GENL.L, Gulf Keystone Petroleum GKP.L, Shamaran Petroleum SNM.V, HKN Energy Ltd, and Hunt Oil. Collectively they produce about 50% of the oil in Iraq’s Kurdistan.
Turkey halted flows through Iraq’s northern oil export route after an arbitration ruling in March by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ordered Ankara to pay Baghdad damages for unauthorised exports between 2014 and 2018.
Negotiations on the restart of flows are ongoing.
Iraqi government oil officials for the first time met with APIKUR representatives on Wednesday to discuss the resumption of flows to Turkey.
Following the pipeline closure, DNO has partly restored production from its Tawke and Peshkabir fields, selling its share of oil to the local market at prices “that vary narrowly in the mid $30s per barrel”, the company said.
Its gross production in Kurdistan continued to rise in the fourth quarter from a daily average of 25,984 barrels of oil in the third quarter, it added.
Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest oil producer, exports about 85% of its crude via ports in the south. The northern route via Turkey accounts for about 0.5% of global oil supply.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; additional reporting by Natalie Grover;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)