Kurdish Oil Keeps Flowing Despite Baghdad's Threats Over Kirkuk - Bloomberg

Kurdish Oil Keeps Flowing Despite Baghdad's Threats Over Kirkuk - Bloomberg:

"Oil flowed normally from fields in northern Iraq even as government troops and allied militias faced off with forces from the independence-seeking Kurdish region on the outskirts of the disputed area of Kirkuk. Exports of about 600,000 barrels a day of crude from Kirkuk’s oil fields and from deposits inside the adjacent Kurdish region continued as usual through a Kurd-controlled pipeline to Turkey, according to a person familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The shipments from Kirkuk combine crude pumped by Iraq’s state-owned North Oil Co. and by the Kurdistan Regional Government, and both flows are normal, Kirkuk Governor Najmaddin Kareem said Sunday. Kirkuk, home to Iraq’s oldest-producing oil fields, has emerged as a potential flashpoint of conflict between the country’s federal government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous KRG. Iraq is the second-largest OPEC producer, pumping most of its 4.47 million barrels a day from fields in the south and shipping it from the Persian Gulf port of Basra. But with Iraq supplying about 14 percent of total production from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a conflict centered in the country’s north could have an immediate impact on oil markets."



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