Iraq’s northern pipeline is said to be moving 500,000 barrels a day, on one unnamed source
A North Oil Company source told Kurdistan24 that Ceyhan throughput reached half a million barrels per day on 1 November, with Basra crude trucked north to join Kirkuk and Kurdish grades. No official has confirmed it.
Total Iraqi crude routed through Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal rose to 500,000 barrels per day on the evening of Sunday 1 November, according to a source at the North Oil Company who spoke to Kurdistan24’s Kirkuk correspondent Soran Kamaran. The same source described the physical arrangement: Basra crude reaches collection stations at Sarallu and Khurmala by tanker truck and is pumped north from there, with SOMO sending a combined 500,000 bpd of Kirkuk, Kurdistan Region and Basra grades through the Kurdistan Region pipeline to Ceyhan. Roughly 200,000 bpd of that is Basra crude, oilprice.com reported on 2 November. The source said volumes rose after an agreement with the KRG’s natural resources ministry. Kurdistan24 attached its own caveat to the figure: it comes from a company source and no official has confirmed it.
The driver is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since March 2026, which has pushed Iraq and other Gulf producers toward alternative terminals. The northern line has had a volatile year. Bloomberg reported on 3 March that about 200,000 bpd of Kurdistan Region shipments were shut in as producers cut output precautionarily, leaving only 50,000 bpd moving. Iraq then announced a restart of 250,000 bpd, with North Oil Company saying it had begun operating the Sarlo pumping station to resume pumping Kirkuk oil “with an initial capacity of 250,000 barrels per day,” according to Asharq Al-Awsat. Crude sales make up 90 percent of Iraq’s budget revenues, the same report noted.
Assessment: Three outlets carried this on 2 November; it is one claim with three bylines, not three confirmations. What would settle it is a SOMO statement, BOTAŞ loading data or November tanker tracking, none of which exists in the public record yet. Treat the barrel count as a claim about capacity rather than a measured export. The more interesting unknown is the economics: trucking Basra crude a thousand kilometres north to a pipeline is an expensive workaround, and nobody has published the freight cost, the truck count, or whether SOMO or Erbil absorbs it. That number, when it appears, will say more about how long the rerouting can last than the headline figure does.