ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Ministry of Oil and Natural Resources announced the exports of oil for May in a statement released Saturday.
Most of the reported May oil was shipped to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
According to the report, the Kurdistan Regional Government exported over 17.9 million barrels of crude oil—an average of 557,621 barrels per day—in the month of May. According to the latest Baghdad-Erbil agreement, the KRG should send only 550,000 bpd through the Kurdistan pipelines to Ceyhan.
The statement also reported the KRG contributed 12.6 million barrels (407,111 bpd on average), while fields operated by the North Oil Company contributed nearly 5.3 million barrels at an average of 170,509 bpd.
In May, the KRG supplied state oil marketing firm SOMO in Ceyhan port with nearly 14 million barrels, which is an average of 448,889 bpd, including over 1.34 million barrels that were delivered to SOMO in April, according to the statement.
According to these figures the KRG will remain on track to meet its oil export commitments under the 2015 federal budget and KRG export volumes continue to increase.
According to the latest oil and budget agreement on the Kurdistan and Kirkuk oilfields, the Kurdistan region is required to export 550,000 bpd and Baghdad in return must pay the KRG 1.2 trillion Iraqi dinars, worth more than $1 billion dollars. However, the Baghdad government has been consistently short on its end of the deal, paying only $409 million in April.
Tuesday, Iraqi MP Ahmed Rashid, the head of the Kurdistan Islamic League, told Rudaw the Iraqi Central Bank has warned Kurdish leadership that the central government has also decided to decrease the salary of the Kurdistan region’s employees for the month of June.
