Iraq said there has been progress in talks with officials from the semiautonomous entity controlling the country’s north and representatives of international companies operating there for a deal to resume oil exports via a pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
“There is progress in these negotiations, and we expect to reach an understanding in (a) few days,” Oil Minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani said in an interview with the state-owned Iraqiya TV on Sunday.
The Iraq-Türkiye oil pipeline that once handled about 0.5% of global oil supplies has been stuck in limbo for more than a year after its closure, as legal and financial hurdles impede the resumption of flows from the region.
Sunday’s meeting in Baghdad, attended by Abdel-Ghani and officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Natural Resources, comes after a call by Iraq’s Oil Ministry last month for KRG authorities and international energy companies to meet and discuss restarting the exports.
“It’s still early to say a final deal is possible to reach but we can say the talks have positive aspects,” said a senior Oil Ministry official on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of talks.
The talks were expected to focus on the KRG’s production-sharing energy contracts, which Baghdad wants to amend, and the oil production costs that the foreign oil companies claim for oil produced in the northern region, said the official.
The sharing of oil revenues between Iraq’s federal government and the KRG has been a cause of tensions between the two sides.
Abdel-Ghani said that revenue would be deposited in an account at the Iraqi central bank.
Iraq had blamed foreign companies, alongside the KRG authorities, for the delay in restarting crude exports because they had so far not submitted their contracts to the federal oil ministry for revisions.
It was not clear if the Kurdish delegates and the foreign firms have accepted the provision to the Oil Ministry of their contracts during Sunday’s meeting.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed S. Al Sudani last month confirmed the government was eager to resolve the impasse over prices but said the companies refused to amend contracts signed years ago with KRG.
Flows through the Iraq-Türkiye pipeline were halted following an arbitration ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).
The ICC ordered Ankara to pay Baghdad damages of $1.5 billion over what it said were unauthorized exports by the KRG between 2014 and 2018.
Türkiye, on the other hand, said the ICC had recognized most of Ankara’s demands and ordered Iraq to compensate it for several violations concerning the case.
