ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The Kurdistan Region has exported more than 33 million barrels of oil through Iraq’s State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO) via the Iraq-Turkey pipeline since late September, the natural resources minister said on Tuesday.

“As of two days ago, we had exported 33 million barrels of our oil through the SOMO company to the port of Ceyhan,” Kamal Mohammad, the Kurdistan Region’s natural resources minister, told The New Region.

A tripartite agreement in late September between Erbil, Baghdad, and international oil companies (IOCs) ended a 30-month pause in exporting the Kurdistan Region's oil. 

The agreement, which was set to expire by the end of the year, has been extended “for three months and there are no issues,” according to the minister.

Despite coming under successive drone attacks, the Kurdistan Region's oil fields quickly recovered to bring production capacity back to normal levels, with between 190,000 and 218,000 barrels of oil delivered per day to SOMO via Ceyhan port.

Per the agreement, 50,000 barrels per day are allocated to domestic consumption within the Region, while the remainder is sent to SOMO for export.

The Kurdistan Region’s oil exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port had been halted since March 2023, when a Paris-based arbitration court ruled that Ankara had breached a 1973 pipeline agreement by allowing Erbil to start selling oil independently in 2014, awarding the case to Baghdad.

The halt in oil exports dealt a major blow to Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, with over $30 billion in lost revenue.