Baghdad Claims Preliminary Accord in Oil Talks; Erbil Reports No Progress

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Comments by officials in Baghdad and Erbil shed no light on a seething oil quarrel between the two sides, with Iraq’s deputy premier saying that a preliminary agreement had been reached and the Kurdish premier reporting no progress in talks.

Meanwhile, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz added that facilities storing Kurdish crude at the port of Ceyhan – awaiting sale and re-export once the Erbil-Baghdad row has been resolved – are nearly full.

In an interview with Sky News Arabia, Iraq's deputy prime minister for energy affairs, Hussein Shahristani, said that the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has given preliminary approval for Kurdish oil exports through Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO).

He claimed that Erbil had said in a statement that the exports would be within the framework of Iraqi regulations, and that they had not begun yet due to technical reasons. Shahirstani said that Baghdad was waiting for Erbil to commit to that decision.

However, there has been no indication from Erbil that such an accord has been agreed.

Earlier, Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani announced that talks with Baghdad had made no progress. “We were expecting to reach an agreement within Iraq and for that we showed a lot of patience, but our patience has a limit,” the premier said at a news conference.  “If we know we can’t reach an agreement we will have our own solution,” he warned.

Iraq and its autonomous Kurds fail to see eye-to-eye over oil exports from the Kurdistan Region. Early this year the Kurds began exports through a newly-extended pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Baghdad vehemently objected, cutting off Erbil from the national budget, declaring the exports “illegal” and threatening to sue any company lifting Kurdish oil at Ceyhan.

Turkey, which badly needs Kurdish oil for its growing economy but also does not want to anger Baghdad, said it would only store the oil until an accord was reached between Baghdad and Erbil. Months later, there is still no clarity over the issue.

Yildiz, the Turkish energy minister, said lately that the volume of exported crude from Kurdistan via its own independent pipeline has reached 1.5 million barrels. “We will be in a position to send this oil to world markets once the tanks are full. We can’t keep this in tanks,” he said.

“The pipeline on the Iraqi side is in unusable shape. This is a loss for Iraq,” the Reuters news agency quoted him as saying.

Kurdistan’s completion of an independent pipeline early this year, to export oil to Turkey, added to the tensions between Erbil and Baghdad. Each claims to have authority over oil extraction and export based on different interpretations of Iraq’s constitution.