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| Iraq |
| Iraq’s Oil Exports Collapsed by 82% in March as SOMO Scrambles to Build Emergency Alternatives |
| 2026-04-14 |
| [NationalContext] The war’s first full month wiped out most of Iraq’s seaborne export capacity. The patchwork of fallback routes Baghdad assembled kept some revenue flowing, but March’s earnings covered less than a third of the country’s monthly salary bill. Thank Iran and their PMFs Iraq exported roughly 18 million barrels of oil in March and earned about $2 billion, according to remarks by Ali Nizar al-Shatari, director general of the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), published on April 2. That figure, which covers combined exports from Basra, the Kurdistan Region and Kirkuk, represents an 82% collapse from February, when Iraq exported 99,872,220 barrels and earned $6.814 billion. Revenue fell by roughly 71%. A Reuters survey of OPEC output found Iraq suffered the biggest production drop in the cartel, averaging just 1.4 million barrels per day in March compared with 4.15 million bpd in February. February was Iraq’s last near-normal export month. Of the 99.87 million barrels shipped, 93.35 million came from central and southern fields, 5.55 million from the Kurdistan Region via Ceyhan, and 971,130 from Qayyarah. The average daily rate was about 3.567 million bpd. One month later, the daily average had fallen to roughly 580,000 bpd. March was not a month of smooth rerouting. It was a month of structural breakdown in which Iraq’s core seaborne outlet through the Strait of Hormuz was effectively destroyed and a much smaller flow of oil was kept alive through a patchwork of emergency channels. The Associated Press reported on April 2 that Basra province output had dropped from 3.1 million bpd to about 900,000, and that southern exports were completely halted by that point. The head of the state-run Basra Oil Company, Bassem Abdul Karim, told AP that no alternative loading areas in the south were yet fully operational. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-04-14 07:52 |