International Oil Companies Caught In Kurdish Smuggling Web

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• A Reuters investigation found that over 1,000 tanker trucks are smuggling at least 200,000 barrels of Kurdish oil per day to Iran and Turkey.

• The smuggling operation generates an estimated $200 million in monthly revenue, but the destination of the funds remains unclear.

• The illicit trade has flourished since a pipeline to Turkey was closed in March 2023 due to a dispute over export rights.

Kurdistan hasn’t been able to export its oil via a pipeline for more than a year now, but crude continues to flow out of the semi-autonomous Iraqi region—on tank trucks to the border with Iran. 

More than 1,000 such tank trucks are estimated to be transporting at least 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Kurdish oil to Iran and Turkey, a Reuters investigation has found.  

Although the price of the crude being smuggled out of the northern semi-autonomous region is reportedly around $40 per barrel in these murky deals, the trade is lucrative, especially compared to the hardships the Kurdistan regional government has seen without oil revenues over the past year. 

The smuggling is estimated to be bringing around $200 million per month, according to Reuters, whose reporters talked with more than 20 people, including oil engineers, oil industry sources, traders, government officials, politicians, and diplomats. 

Some of these sources told Reuters that the oil smuggling was likely happening with the knowledge of the regional and federal governments. Once in Iran, the oil is loaded onto ships at the Iranian ports in the Gulf at Bandar Imam Khomeini and Bandar Abbas, or transferred by road to Afghanistan and Pakistan, industry, political, and diplomatic sources told Reuters. 

Other sources said that no one really knows what happens with the $200 million monthly revenue from these operations. 

The smuggling business has thrived since the closure of the pipeline route to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, which the semi-autonomous region of OPEC’s second-largest producer used to ship its oil abroad until March 2023. 

These exports via pipeline to Turkey, of about 450,000 bpd, ceased last year after they were shut in in March 2023 due to a dispute over who should authorize the Kurdish exports. 

The impasse followed an International Chamber of Commerce ruling in March 2023 in a dispute between Turkey and Iraq regarding Kurdistan oil. The ICC ruled in favor of Iraq, which had argued that Turkey should not allow Kurdish oil exports via the Iraq-Turkey pipeline and the Turkish port of Ceyhan without approval from the federal government of Iraq.

Now, only Iraq’s state oil marketing firm SOMO has the right to sell crude oil produced anywhere in Iraq. 

And it looks like the re-opening of the pipeline to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast is not a priority for politicians in Baghdad. 

In November 2023, Norwegian firm DNO, one of the six members of the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR), said that the international oil companies operating in Kurdistan would not be producing oil for exports until they have clarity about overdue and future payments and sales terms. 

Some companies have resumed oil production for the local market. 

But industry sources told Reuters that the local buyers, approved to buy the crude, sell it via middlemen for export without the international firms knowing of these re-selling operations. 

The smuggling adds between 200,000 bpd and over 300,000 bpd to Iraqi supply, as estimated by various Reuters sources. Privately, Iraqi officials have cited this trade as one of the reasons why Iraq – OPEC’s second-largest producer – has failed to limit its output under the OPEC+ deal so far. 

Iraq hasn’t complied with the current cuts despite continuously pledging it would show better discipline going forward.  

Compensation plans have been prepared for Iraq, as well as non-OPEC producer Kazakhstan, which is part of the OPEC+ group but has failed to stick to its quota, too. Between January and March 2024 alone, Iraq’s cumulative overproduction stood at 602,000 bpd, per OPEC’s estimates. 

Iraq has a 4-million-bpd cap on production. It pumped 4.189 million bpd in June—down by 25,000 bpd from May, per OPEC’s secondary sources in its latest monthly report released this week. But that’s nearly 200,000 bpd above its target under the OPEC+ deal.