Iraq oil exports climb in May despite attacks

摘要

Amman—Iraqi oil exports rose for a second consecutive month in May, according to official figures, despite the continued outage of the country’s main northern export pipeline and amid an escalating row with the semi-autonomous Kurdish region over export revenues. Iraq exported 2.582 million b/d of crude in May, all from its southern oil terminals, as the country’s northern export pipeline remained inoperable. May exports were 73,000 b/d more than the 2.509 b/d exported from the country in April and set a new post-war record for southern exports. But they were still well below February’s rate of 2.8 million b/d for the whole of Iraq — the highest since before the Iraq-Iran war in 1979 — due to the March 2 suspension of exports through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline after a major sabotage attack.