The flow of oil from Iraq's northern fields along the vulnerable pipeline to Turkey halted early on Sunday, an Iraqi oil ministry source said on Monday. The flow stopped after Turkish officials told Iraq that storage at Turkey's Ceyhan terminal was full, the ministry source said.
The pipeline has been mostly idled since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 due to sabotage attacks. The oil ministry denied sabotage was to blame for the latest halt. Kirkuk police chief Shirko Shakir also said on Monday that there had been no attack on the pipeline at the weekend. But a shipping source at Ceyhan said that storage there was not full.
"There is only 1.96 million barrels of Kirkuk oil in storage," he said. "There are another five or six million barrels of storage available before it is full." Iraq's state oil marketing company SOMO issued a tender on Sunday to sell 6 million barrels of crude oil at Ceyhan, and said the crude was already in storage tanks in Turkey.
SOMO cancelled a sale tender in July as it had failed to pump enough oil through the line to make the sales. The flow stopped at 0100 local time (2300 GMT) on Sunday, the shipping source said. Pumping had restarted last Tuesday for the first time since a sabotage attack on July 9. Iraq relies on its southern Basra terminal on the Gulf for most of its oil exports. Exports from the terminal came to 1.64 million barrels per day in August.
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