Iraq started pumping oil to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan Tuesday, July 10, and was poised to start exports through its Gulf terminal at Mina Al-Bakr after a five-week dispute with the United Nations was resolved, oil sources said.
"The flow began at 0952 GMT," Gokhan Yardim, head of Turkey's oil and gas company, told AFP. Yardim said that four ships were waiting at Ceyhan to load crude once the storage tanks were filled. He could not give a date for the start of the loading.
The Turkish energy ministry said in a statement that 5,000 cubic meters of oil per hour was flowing through the 986-kilometer (616-mile) pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 71 million tons.
An industry source at Iraq's Gulf terminal at Mina Al-Bakr, meanwhile, told AFP that "exports will resume within hours. Preparations are underway to start loading the first tanker," a Greek-flagged ship. "Other tankers are awaited," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Al-Douri, said Monday that oil exports would restart within two days. "Everything will be normalized, I hope as early as possible, maybe tomorrow, maybe in two days," he said. The exact timing of a resumption of crude exports depends on the technical preparations, he said.
The preparations follow an agreement Monday between the United Nations and Iraq on conditions for a 150-day extension of the oil-for-food program under which sanctions-hit Baghdad exports crude.
"We are in a position to put more than two million barrels per day back onto the market," a senior Iraqi oil ministry official said Tuesday, quoted in Al-Qadissiya newspaper. But he said "holds" placed by the UN sanctions committee on Iraqi oil spare parts contracts were blocking efforts to raise production capacity to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) from the current level of three million bpd.
Iraq suspended exports on June 4 in protest at a US-backed British proposal to impose "smart" sanctions, a project which was shelved at the UN Security Council last week because of a threatened Russian veto.
Baghdad has been under embargo since its troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. The Iraqi military was expelled by a US-led coalition force in the Gulf War seven months later. But Iraq has since December 1996 exported oil from Mina Al-Bakr and the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean under the humanitarian program designed to ease the hardships of sanctions on the 22-million population.
Oil prices in London were stable earlier Tuesday, as brokers had already factored in the resumption of Iraqi supplies. At 1000 GMT the benchmark Brent North Sea crude for August delivery stood at $26.19 a barrel after opening at 26.20. Brent closed at $26.15 on Monday as a heady rally at the end of last week ran out of steam.
The pre-weekend upswing was fueled by a report from the US energy department suggesting that the Iraqi export freeze would push US stocks below normal levels by the end of the summer. Crude prices had fallen sharply in previous weeks in response to swelling stocks, despite Baghdad's suspension of exports.
On the political front, US Middle East envoy William Burns said on a visit to Yemen that Washington remains committed to imposing smart sanctions on Baghdad. Washington is committed to "continuing to work to establish a system which moves away from civilian sanctions against Iraq towards an effective weapons control regime," Burns said.
The system would "ease the burden on the Iraqi people and keep the focus on obligations which the Iraqi regime continues to have," he said in a statement issued in Sanaa, referring to the embargo linked to Iraq's disarmament.
Iraqi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Naji Sabri, meanwhile, said his country insists on a total lifting of sanctions. "Iraq rejects any project which does not provide for a total lifting of the unjust embargo," he said on state television. "We met our commitments a long time ago and now it's the turn of the Security Council." ― (AFP, Baghdad)
by Farouk Choukri
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
