2 May 2003
Crude oil production from Iraq’s northern Kirkuk oil complex has been ramped up to 60,000 barrels per day this week and is likely to rise to at least 130,000 b/d once the first crude oil unit at the Baiji refinery becomes operational again, an official of North Oil Co. (NOC) said Thursday.
“We started initial production at 20,000 b/d on Apr. 24 and are currently producing 60,000 b/d using one degassing station at the Baba dome,” NOC’s director of operations, Mohammad Hussein, told International Oil Daily in Kirkuk Thursday.
Baba, one of three such domes in the giant Kirkuk oil field, was producing about 400,000 b/d before the war, processed at five gas-oil separation stations: Jabal Bur, Shurao, Baba, Hanjira, and Qutan. The current production is being processed at Baba and pumped either into a pipeline to supply the Daura refinery near Baghdad or into storage.
The 290,000 b/d Baiji refinery, the biggest of Iraq’s three refineries, is expected to return back to operations once power outages problems are solved. NOC officials said the plant could start operations again as soon as today with the operation of one 70,000 crude oil unit, to be followed by another similar unit at a later stage. Both could be supplied from the Baba dome.
However, supplies to refineries could be slowed as a result of the bombing of major flow lines during the war and the re-commissioning of old pipelines that have not been in use for long periods of time.
“We are pumping between 48,000 b/d and 55,000 b/d to Daura refinery through the K2 pipeline in Siniya [near Baiji],” Hussein said, referring to a subterranean pipeline that is being reactivated following the bombing of overground flow lines which used to supply Daura before the war.
Capacity of the old K2 pipeline is restricted to 60,000 b/d due to corrosion. According to Hussein, Daura could be supplied by reversing the K3 line, diverting supplies from the K3 pumping stations that were also destroyed by bombardment, to raise supplies to Daura to its capacity of 100,000 b/d.
The Daura refinery, which was supplied by crude from the southern oil fields through the strategic south-north pipeline before the war, had to cut runs to 23,000 b/d early this week after starting up at 43,000 b/d, as a result of bottlenecks caused by low consumption at power stations in Baghdad.
Before the war, Daura used to be supplied by an additional supply of 10,000 b/d from the Naft Khanah oil field in eastern Iraq and 6,000 b/d of heavy crude from the East Baghdad field.
The Baiji refinery was also supplied by crude from the Jambur and Bai Hassan fields as well as Kirkuk. Such alternative supplies are not currently possible due to looting at the Jambur oil facilities, including its pumping station, switch gears, control panels, and even cables. Jambur’s prewar production capacity was 80,000 b/d, while Bai Hassan’s stood at 120,000 b/d.
“We could push Jambur to 10,000 b/d but it’s not worth it, in view of the number of staff needed to do that and the need to do all operations manually,” NOC’s deputy director general, Adel Qazaz, told International Oil Daily.
However, Jambur South is currently producing 160 million cubic feet per day of sweet gas that is being pumped to power plants in Baghdad and Mosul, in northern Iraq.
Elsewhere in NOC’s sphere of operations, prewar production capacity at the Khabbaz field was 25,000-30,000 b/d, while the Saddam field could pump a similar amount.
The latter — now known as the Ajeel field — will not be brought back into production any time soon, since the main pipeline that links it to the IT1-A pumping station has been destroyed near the Fatha bridge, north of Tikrit. NOC officials have not been able to assess production facilities at Khabbaz.
Indicative of the confusion surrounding the precise state of Iraq’s oil facilities, the NOC figures do not correspond exactly with details released by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which has been charged with overseeing repairs to the sector after the war.
The USACE said Wednesday that production in northern Iraq has already climbed to around 120,000 b/d, all from the Baba plant. It said the Daura refinery was now operating at around 60,000 b/d but that it was still awaiting confirmation that Baiji was back on stream and processing around 50,000 b/d of Kirkuk crude.
By Ruba Husari, Kirkuk
(Published in International Oil Daily May 2, 2003)