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BAGHDAD, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Four sabotage blasts
have brought oil exports from Kurdistan (northern
Iraq) to a halt and repairs could take up to one
month to carry out, an oil official said on Sunday.
"The exports to Ceyhan (Turkey) have stopped
completely because of four blasts that hit a main
gathering centre for at least four fields," the
official told Reuters.
He said that oil from Kirkuk, Janbour, Bay Hassan,
Khabaz and other northern fields were gathered at
the centre.
Meanwhile, in the south of Iraq, high seas and thick
dust have halted oil loadings from Iraq's main Basra
terminal since Friday, a shipping source said.
Seven oil tankers are anchored waiting to load. It
was not clear how long the delays would last in the
port which was shipping 84,000 barrels per hour
before the bad weather began, the source said.
"There is no sailing or loading, we don't know when
the weather will be better," the source said.
Iraq has relied on its Basra Oil Terminal to ship
crude since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, as
repeated sabotage along the Kurdistan(Iraq)-Turkey
pipeline has kept that export route mostly idle.
The northern pipeline only recently resumed exports
to Turkey's Ceyhan port after repairs following
sabotage.
But on Thursday, a bomb attack on a secondary oil
pipeline that feeds the route to Turkey cut exports
by 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 600,000 bpd.
The pipeline, which was designed to carry more than
1.5 million bpd, has been closed for most of the
post-invasion era. It runs through Arab Sunni areas
hostile to American forces and the U.S.-backed
government.
The flows to a storage facility on the border had
increased from 200,000 to 500,000 to 700,000 bpd in
the last week.
Reuters
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