Northern exports still off as Turkey cites “technical issues”

ISTANBUL - Turkey has declined Iraq’s recent instruction to resume oil exports on Saturday, citing technical reasons, according to two officials at Iraq’s state oil marketing company (SOMO).

The delay further prolongs a pipeline outage that has already lasted seven weeks, removing 475,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude exports from global markets and presenting an existential threat to the oil industry in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkey’s state pipeline company, Botas, told SOMO that unspecified “technical issues” prevented the pipeline from starting up on May 14, as the Iraqi side had requested last week, according to one of the SOMO officials, who said they were told the Turkish side needed “a few days.”