Iraq’s Oil Ministry has announced the preliminary figures of oil exports for December and the year 2015 as a whole, as issued by the state-owned National Petroleum Marketing Company (SOMO).
Reuters quoted Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad as saying that ‘the total oil exports for 2015 amounted to 1.96bn barrels, with a total revenue of $49.79bn, with an average price of $44.74 a barrel, at a rate of 3.5mn barrels per day (bpd)’.
Jihad said that ‘the volume of exports last month (December) amounted to 99.65mn, an average of 3mn bpd’.
‘Revenues amounted to $2.97bn, with an average price of $29.835 a barrel,’ he said.
He added that the exports were only from southern Iraq because of the ‘stoppage of the delivery of agreed quantities by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)’, the authority for the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Iraq’s federal government is yet to reach a deal on oil exports with the Kurdish region, the country’s Oil Minister earlier said.
Abdul-Mahdi in an interview to Reuters in December reiterated Baghdad’s opposition to Erbil selling its oil directly instead of delivering it to Iraq’s SOMO.
“We are still in a standstill. We are waiting for real discussions with our brothers in Kurdistan,” he said.
The KRG began bypassing Baghdad and exporting oil directly in 2014, following a dispute with the federal government about its share of the budget. It is currently exporting more than 500,000 bpd.
“If they deliver oil, they will have the 17%, if they don’t they will not have the 17%,” he said, referring to the portion of the federal budget allocated to the Kurdish authority in exchange for its oil.
