Ashti Hawrami, the Kurdistan Regional Government Natural Resources Minister, announced that a new pipeline should be completed by the end of September, which will allow the autonomous region to supply oil to the Turkish border, without using any Iraqi owned infrastructure.
The pipeline will carry oil to Fishkabour, near the border with Turkey; currently the KRG has to transport it's oil via trucks after halting all exports through the Baghdad-run pipeline in December, due to arguments over crude oil revenues.
Kurdistan has a production capacity of 300,000 barrels a day at the moment, but that is expected to grow to 400,000 barrels a day this year, and with six more fields expected to start operations by the end of the year the region is well on its way to fill the pipes capacity.
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The KRG hopes that by building its own oil and natural gas pipelines to Turkey it can start to achieve full economic self-sufficiency.
Robin Mills, the head of consulting at Manaar Energy Consulting and Project Management, told Bloomberg that "if the Kurds go ahead with the exports to Turkey, it will have a big implication. They want to develop their oil and they've been struggling to do that because of the problems of getting paid and the problems of having consistent exports, so they kind of see this as the only way to go ahead."
By. Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com
Charles is a writer for Oilprice.com More
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