Crude oil flows from Iraq's Kurdistan region to Turkey's Ceyhan port are running at around 180,000 barrels per day, up from 150,000-160,000 bpd earlier in the week after they resumed on September 27 for the first time in 2-1/2 years, two shipping sources told Reuters.
The first tanker loading of Iraqi Kurdistan crude from Ceyhan since the restart will take place on Thursday, the sources said. They said the tanker, Vallesina, will load 700,000 barrels of crude.
Flows resumed on Saturday, as eight oil companies operating in Iraqi Kurdistan reached agreements with Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
According to the agreement, the KRG will deliver the crude to SOMO, Iraq's national oil marketer, and an independent trader will handle sales from Ceyhan using SOMO's official prices.
Producers will get $16 per barrel. The deal came as OPEC+ oil-producing countries have been increasing output to gain market share.
Deal with BP
The resumption in oil flows to Turkey comes amid the renewed focus on developing Iraqi Kurdish oil, with Iraq having activated a contract with BP to develop Kirkuk oilfields, targeting preliminary production of 328,000 barrels per day, the country's oil minister said on Thursday.
The agreement, originally signed earlier this year, involves BP working alongside Iraq’s state-run North Oil Company (NOC) and North Gas Company (NGC) to rehabilitate and expand production at the Baba and Avana domes of the Kirkuk field, as well as the Jambour, Bai Hassan, and Khabbaz fields.
The contract sets an initial production target of 328,000 barrels per day, with further increases expected through field development, Iraq's oil minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani said in a statement.
"Setting the initial production rate at 328,000 barrels per day marks the launch of the contract, and any increase beyond that will come through development operations," he said.
BP is expected to spend up to $25 billion over the lifetime of the project, a senior Iraqi oil official told Reuters in February.
The energy major was a member of the consortium of oil companies that discovered oil in Kirkuk in the 1920s. BP has estimated that the Kirkuk field holds about 9 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The company holds a 50 percent stake in a joint venture operating the giant Rumaila oilfield in the south of the country, where it has been operating for a century.