All four Al Amaya terminal berths to be ready this year

All four berths of the Al Amaya terminal in southern Iraq will be ready by the end of this year, which will help the country export an additional 1.2 million barrels of oil per day.

Jabbar A. Al Leaby, director-general of South Oil Company (SAC), said on the sidelines of the MEED conference on Iraq's reconstruction: "We have restored two berths of the terminal and are trying to restore two more by the end of the year. Currently, Iraq exports most of its oil through the Basra terminal."

Al Leaby said in the south, SAC has just started loading 400,000 barrels per day using the two berths of Al Amaya which have been restored so far. "For the first time in 30 years we loaded two tankers of oil from this terminal."

The four berths of Khor Al Amaya were destroyed during the Iraq-Iran war.

Once the two additional berths of Khor Al Amaya are ready, Iraq will be able to export an additional 1.2 million barrels per day from this terminal alone.

On the current oil export situation in Iraq, Al Leaby said in good weather, Basra and Khor Al Amaya put together can export around 1.8 million bpd. However, he quickly pointed out that Iraq is not able to export oil at a consistent level because of bad weather.

Iraq is also trying to restore its storage capacity. "Currently we have only around 40 per cent of our original 17 million barrels storage capacity. We hope to restore our full capacity soon so that we can export more."

Al Leaby said all the fields in the south together produce around 2 million bpd of oil. Out of the oil produced from the southern fields, nearly 150,000 barrels go to the Basra refinery.

When asked about the Iraq-Kuwait oil pipeline, he said it was only at the conceptual stage and that they needed to know Kuwait's views on the pipeline. Kuwait announced last Sunday that it is ready to handle Iraq's exports of 250,000 barrels of oil.

Iraq testing Turkey pipeline for exports

Iraq completed repairs on its pipeline to Turkey and is filling it in preparation for the first exports from the north of the country since the US-led invasion last March.

"The pipeline's been fixed for about two weeks now and we're filling it as part of the testing process,'' said Robert McKee, who stepped down two days ago as the top US adviser to the Iraqi Oil Ministry after a six-month tour. Exports to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan are "more likely to begin in the near term rather than long,'' McKee said on the edge of a Middle East Economic Digest conference in Dubai.

Iraq is trying boost exports to what they were before last year's US-led invasion, as it struggles to repair oil pipelines and terminals damaged by war and sabotage. Until Friday, Iraq exported all its oil through the Basrah Oil Terminal in the Gulf. It has since reopened the Khor Al Amaya terminal.

Iraq produced an average of 2.3 million barrels a day last month, and is producing about 2.5 million now, McKee said. Most of that is coming from the south, while in the north oil that isn't used in refineries because their capacity isn't big enough, is being re-injected into the field, McKee said.