Pipeline Sabotage Drops Iraq's March Oil Exports

Iraq's oil exports fell to 2.39 million barrels per day (bpd) on average in March, the oil ministry said, down from a record 2.8 million in February due to repeated sabotage of a northern pipeline.
 

The ministry said on Thursday that 2.37 million bpd were shipped from its southern Basra ports, whilst exports from the northern Kirkuk oilfields were halted for almost the entire month of March due to insurgent attacks on a pipeline to Turkey.

Repair work on the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline is on hold, because insurgents whose bombs halted its operations in the first place have killed technicians sent to fix it, extending what is already the longest outage since the days of sanctions in the 1990s.

Oil revenue amounted to $7.5 billion in March at an average selling price of $101.036 dollars per barrel, the ministry said in a statement on its website.

An official from the state-run South Oil Company earlier this month put the average level of exports from Basra higher at 2.424 million bpd.

(Reporting by Raheem Salman; editing by Jane Baird)