Iraq is hoping to ship up to 250,000 barrels of oil per day to a port in Türkiye via a rehabilitated pipeline, its oil minister said, after the US-Israeli war on Iran cut off its main export route.
The amount would be just a fraction of the roughly 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) that Iraq exported before the conflict, mostly through its southern Basra port and the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has been severely disrupted by the war.
Authorities want to restore an old pipeline -- out of service for years -- that links the northern Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, where the oil could be shipped onwards to international buyers.
Oil Minister Hayan Abdel Ghani said late Sunday that the pipeline's rehabilitation is "complete, but there is a 100-kilometer section that needs to be inspected".
Teams will "conduct a hydrostatic test, which is the final phase of the pipeline's rehabilitation", hopefully "within a week", Ghani added, citing an export target of roughly 250,000 bpd.
The pipeline was damaged by the ISIS group in 2014.
Its use, however, requires "contact with the Turkish side and an agreement on logistical and technical issues", said oil expert Assem Jihad.
Initially, Baghdad wanted to send exports to the Ceyhan port via another pipeline that runs through Kurdistan.
But "so far, no agreement has been reached", Ghani said, as relations between the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan and the federal government in Baghdad have deteriorated.
He acknowledged that "Iraqi oil exports were halted two or three days after the start of the war".
The country is also considering the possibility of transporting 200,000 bpd by tanker trucks, primarily via Jordan and Syria.
Iraq derives more than 90 percent of its revenue from oil.
Experts have warned that without this income, the state -- Iraq's largest employer -- will be unable to pay civil servants' salaries and risks a foreign currency shortage to finance imports or stabilise its exchange rate.
