ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Negotiations to reach an agreement on resuming Kurdistan Region’s oil exports through the Turkish Ceyhan port are proceeding “positively”, and an understanding could be reached soon, a well-informed source told state media on Thursday.

Speaking at a press conference at the Jambur oil field in Kirkuk on Wednesday, Iraqi Oil Minister Hayyan Abdul Ghani said that Baghdad will be receiving 80,000 barrels of oil from the Kurdistan Region in the coming days to be exported through the Ceyhan pipeline.

A well-informed source from the Iraqi oil ministry told the state-owned al-Sabah newspaper on Thursday that the resumption of exports via the Turkish port has not yet been finalized, but confirmed that the ongoing negotiations “have reached very advanced stages, with only a few minor details remaining.”

The Iraqi oil ministry is “moving toward a positive agreement, and during this period, technical and logistical understandings related to exports will be completed,” according to the source who cited Abdul Ghani as saying: “Things are moving in a positive direction.”

“The pumping process requires oil storage. The oil will be collected in tanks and pumped sequentially through the pipeline of Ceyhan port,” the Iraqi oil minister said on Wednesday.

The source also noted that Iraq’s State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) is “technically and logistically ready to resume exports if an agreement is reached.”

Exports of the Kurdistan Region’s oil through the Turkish Ceyhan pipeline were halted in March 2023 after Ankara lost a case against Baghdad in a Paris-based arbitration court. The case accused Ankara of breaching a 1973 agreement by allowing the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to start selling oil independently of Baghdad.

The halt in oil exports through the Ceyhan pipeline in recent years has dealt a major blow to Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, with over 30 billion dollars in lost revenue to date.