Turkey said it is close to completing earthquake damage assessments on a key pipeline that allowed the country to receive crude oil from Iraq and export it before flows were halted.
“It is more or less ready and we will start the operation soon,” Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar told a press conference on Thursday.
His comments add little visibility on when exports will resume through Turkey’s Ceyhan port on the Mediterranean coast. Turkey halted flows through the pipeline in March, after an arbitration court ordered it to pay about $1.5 billion in damages to Iraq for transporting Kurdish oil without Baghdad’s approval.
The ongoing damage assessment is critical for Turkey to defend itself legally if Baghdad, in the future, seeks compensation for additional reparations, Bayraktar said.
Turkey has argued that it is up to Iraq’s central government and its semi-autonomous Kurdish administration to reach a compromise on how to split revenues from oil exports. Last month, Turkish officials told Bloomberg that they were trying to negotiate such a deal and had no intention of paying the fine that Iraq is trying to collect.
