Baghdad — Iraq’s total oil exports stand at 3.6 million barrels per day, Oil Minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani said on Monday, adding that a fire at Iraq’s Zubair oilfield on Sunday did not impact shipments.
Exports were proceeding normally and remained uninterrupted, Abdel-Ghani said, with exports from Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region at 195,000 bpd and sometimes as high as 200,000 bpd after northern shipments resumed following a deal in late September. Iraq reported total oil exports of about 3.4 million bpd last month.
The blaze which broke out while workers were conducting welding operations near a pipeline in the field, left at least two workers dead and seriously wounded five, officials said on Sunday. The fire affected a section from which crude is transported from the Zubair field to nearby storage tanks.
Flows from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region have recovered after Baghdad, the Kurdistan Regional Government and eight international oil companies reached a deal in late September to restart exports through Turkey, ending a two-and-a-half year hiatus that had sharply curtailed northern shipments.
Separately, Abdel-Ghani said Iraq was in talks over the size of its OPEC quota within its capacity of 5.5 million bpd. OPEC’s biggest overproducer submitted plans in April to further cut output to make up for pumping more than agreed quotas.
Abdel-Ghani said Iraq was committed to its current OPEC quota of 4.4 million bpd.
Reporting by Muayad Hameed and Ahmed Rasheed, Writing by Nayera Abdallah and Sarah El Safty; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Bernadette Baum – Reuters
