“Kirkuk’s crude oil will be sent first to Darreh Shahr in Ilam, and then it will be sent to Lorestan and later to Kermanshah’s refinery factory,” Abbas-Ali Jafarinasab, chief executive of the Iranian Oil Pipelines and Telecommunications Company (IOPTC), told IRNA news agency on Sunday.
The refined oil will be sent to Tabriz and Tehran for consumption, Jahfari added.
Iran signed the oil swap agreement with Iraq’s State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) in November 2017, a month after the Iraqi army and Shiite militias seized control of Kirkuk province in October.
Under the agreement, Iraq agreed to export around 30,000 to 60,000 barrels of Kirkuk oil per day in exchange for the same amount of refined Iranian oil delivered to its southern provinces.
Iran sought the import of Kirkuk oil as the fields are located much closer to its northern provinces than its own oil fields in the south, saving vast sums on transport costs.
The distance from Kirkuk to Lorestan is 31 kilometers, a much shorter distance compared to Iran’s main oilfields in Khuzestan province.
The implementation of the deal had been set back amid security concerns. A number of attacks by ISIS sleeper cells on oil facility workers in Kirkuk and Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitias in the area led Iran to request additional security measures on the border.
The Kurdistan Region has only one oil pipeline that connects its oil to Turkey’s Ceyhan port. Iran and Kurdistan Region do not have any oil pipelines, so it must be transferred by tanker trucks.
