Iraq trucks Basra crude north to push Ceyhan flows to 500,000 barrels a day
Three anonymous North Oil Company sources told Shafaq News that throughput at Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal hit a post-restart high on Sunday evening. No Iraqi ministry has put its name to the figure.
The claimed volume — 500,000 barrels per day on the evening of Sunday 1 November — is a jump of roughly 150,000 bpd from about 350,000, which Shafaq rendered as a rise of “nearly 43%.” The composition matters more than the headline number: per IraqiNews, 200,000 bpd of it is Basra crude trucked north into the Iraq–Türkiye pipeline system, amounting to 40% of northern pipeline flows, with the remainder coming from Kirkuk and Kurdistan Region production. Northern field output did not rise. Oil Minister Basim Khudair announced 500,000 bpd as the Ceyhan target around mid-May 2026, per IraqiNews; it has now been met on paper some five and a half months later, by road haulage rather than by the wells.
The context is the Strait of Hormuz, closed since late February and running at eight months. Al Jazeera reported on 28 September that oil revenues supply about 90% of Iraq’s federal budget, that the export decline has hit Baghdad’s ability to pay salaries, and that it has produced protests in the capital — while judging that none of the alternative routes offers a quick fix. The National reported on 4 October that Iraq’s state oil company moved its own crude beyond Hormuz for the first time in decades, shifting part of exports away from the FOB model, with discounts attached. Shafaq’s own front page on 2 November carried an IRGC Navy claim that two tankers exploded in Hormuz; the Files did not retrieve that story.
Assessment: Treat 500,000 as a claim, not a measurement. It rests on three unnamed sources inside the state-run North Oil Company, an institution with an obvious interest in the number being large; IraqiNews and Hellenic Shipping News run word-for-word identical text and are one source, and Oilprice is downstream of both. Nothing from the Oil Ministry, SOMO or Ankara. More to the point, a volume built on truck convoys is reversible within a week and tells you nothing about pipeline capacity or northern production. What it does show is Baghdad paying a haulage premium to keep a salary bill moving while Hormuz stays shut — a cost line, dressed as an export record.