Kurdish Oil Loadings at Turkey's Ceyhan Delayed
Loadings of oil from Iraqi Kurdistan at the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, which were halted on Feb. 17, remained suspended on Monday due to bad weather, shipping agents told Reuters.
Pumping via the pipeline which feeds the port had resumed on Friday and were back to normal, with a pumping rate of close to 600,000 barrels per day, shipping agents said. The storage in the port was being filled during the weekend and was around 1.4 million barrels as of Monday, they added.
Bad weather conditions in the port of Ceyhan were due to continue until the end of the day, so traders said they did not expect loadings to start earlier than Tuesday morning.
According to the traders, the next vessels to be loaded from Ceyhan are the Mabrouk, Sikinos, Sifnos and Vinga.
Oil is the main source of Kurdistan's revenues and the suspension has deepened a budget crisis in the semi-autonomous region amid its fight with Islamic State militants.
The outage was caused by a deteriorating security situation in Turkey's southeast.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Olga Yagova)
