Zaidi calls for 10 million barrels a day while Kirkuk–Ceyhan runs at a ninth of capacity

Iraqi News reported that Zaidi called on Tuesday 1 September for Iraqi oil output to reach 10 million barrels per day by 2030. The item is single-sourced and the venue for the remarks is truncated in the available text; the full statement, presumably from the prime minister’s media office or INA, has not been obtained. Treat it as an announcement rather than a plan: Iraq has published targets of this order for more than a decade without approaching them. The same outlet reported on the same day that PetroChina recorded a drop in its Iraqi oil production during the first half of 2026, attributing it to temporary closures forced by regional conflict. No figures were retrieved. PetroChina’s H1 results are a primary document and are the best independent measure available of what the February war cost Iraqi upstream output.

The export architecture behind the target is thin. Türkiye and Iraq signed a one-year oil pipeline agreement on 1 August; Al Jazeera, citing Turkish data, reported the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line carrying about 170,000 bpd against a nameplate capacity of 1.5 million, largely from Kurdistan-region fields that have absorbed repeated drone and missile attacks. Iraqi exports fell by more than 80 per cent in the weeks after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, and monthly oil revenues dropped from around $6 billion to under $2 billion as Gulf shipments were disrupted. Iraq’s North Oil Company said in March it had resumed exports through the Saralo pumping station with an initial capacity of 250,000 bpd. Under the September 2025 agreement that reopened the line after a shutdown dating to March 2023, the KRG committed at least 230,000 bpd to SOMO plus 50,000 for local use, with $16 a barrel to escrow and $14 to international operators; eight companies signed, and DNO, the largest, did not.

Assessment: This is the fiscal floor under everything else on the desk. A state trying to buy 238,000 PMF salaries, absorb faction demands and stand up its own air defence is doing it on a revenue base that halved and more this year, through a single northern pipeline whose Turkish agreement runs twelve months. Read the 2030 figure as positioning for investors and for Washington, not as a forecast. The numbers worth chasing are PetroChina’s, because they are audited and disinterested, and the current state of the Baghdad–Erbil settlement, including KRG salary transfers, which no source in this sweep could establish.