Start with energy, because the split is almost perfectly clean. The region’s oil sits in the KDP zone: the producing fields of Duhok and Erbil, the pipeline connection to Ceyhan, and the crossing at Ibrahim Khalil, which for a generation was Iraq’s most important land gate to Turkey. The region’s gas sits almost entirely in the PUK zone. Khor Mor, near Chamchamal, reached 750 million cubic feet a day of processing capacity after its KM250 expansion was completed in October 2025, with output already around 700 million, and the pipeline connecting the field to the Sulaymaniyah power plant was completed in late June, Kurdish-language outlets have reported. Chamchamal itself is next, with contracts signed to supply industrial buyers with up to 142 million cubic feet a day from the second half of 2027. Behind those sit two of the largest energy deals in Iraq’s recent history, both in the PUK sphere: a $40 billion agreement for the Miran field and a $70 billion arrangement for the Topkhana-Kurdamir blocks, signed with American companies in 2025.
Oil and gas are not equally useful right now. Oil earns revenue. Gas changes politics. Iranian gas still fuels roughly a third of Iraq’s power generation, which gives Tehran a standing grip on Baghdad that PUK-zone gas can loosen. Turkey’s own gas contract with Iran, 9.6 billion cubic metres a year, expires this month, and analysts already describe Kurdistan gas exports through Turkey as the mechanism that could anchor a durable PUK-Ankara relationship. The KDP’s oil serves budgets. The PUK’s gas serves the region’s central strategic project, which is reducing Iranian leverage in Baghdad and Ankara at the same time. The KDP’s border advantage is eroding in parallel. Assad’s fall opened a Syrian route between Turkey and Iraq that is shorter and cheaper than the Kurdish one: a first cargo convoy crossed it in May, a rail line through Nusaybin, Qamishli, Rabiya and Mosul is the next stage, and Baghdad has approved feasibility studies for pipelines from Basra through Haditha toward both the Turkish and Syrian coasts. Every one of those routes gives Ankara and Baghdad an option that does not pass through KDP territory, which means Ibrahim Khalil no longer sets the terms it once did.
More at the link