A 500,000-barrel Ceyhan figure has circulated for a week with no official behind it

Kurdistan24 reported on 2 November, through its Kirkuk correspondent Soran Kamaran, that total Iraqi crude moving through Ceyhan had reached 500,000 bpd on the evening of Sunday 1 November — the highest since flows through Turkish territory were restored. The outlet attributed the figure to a single North Oil Company source and said plainly in its own text that no official had confirmed it. It separately cited Iraqi local media quoting three NOC sources putting the rise at nearly 43 percent, from 350,000 bpd. The strongest attribution is also the most interested: Baz Karim Barzanji, head of the Erbil-based KAR Group, a shareholder in the Kurdistan Pipeline Company, wrote on 31 October that exports had doubled from 250,000 to 500,000 bpd. IraqiNews published a composition breakdown — 200,000 bpd of Basra crude trucked north, 175,000 from Kurdistan Region fields, 125,000 from Kirkuk. Oilprice aggregated it; Iraq Business News recycled it on 8 November with no new sourcing.

A different method produces a different picture. The National reported on 6 November, citing an Iraq Oil Report analysis of Ceyhan shipping data, a seven-day export average to 5 October of about 328,000 bpd — up sharply from under 200,000 bpd in September, but well short of the half-million mark. The two series are not strictly contradictory: different dates, different instruments. One counts tankers, the other repeats what a producer says is in the pipe. The mechanics underneath are not in dispute. Basra crude is trucked to collection points at Sarallu and Khurmala and pumped into the Iraq–Turkey line through the Kurdistan Region. The Baghdad–Ankara pipeline treaty expired in the summer; exports now run on an extension arranged with Turkish state operator BOTAS, after what Khazal Hostani of the KRG’s natural resources ministry described in July as a one-year temporary protocol, with more than 200,000 bpd flowing at that point.

Assessment: This is how a single-source number becomes infrastructure. A correspondent’s caveat survives the first publication and dies in the aggregation; by the eighth day it is being restated as established without any official ever having put his name to it. The people quoted have reasons to want the larger figure believed — a pipeline shareholder, a producer’s staff, a Baghdad–Erbil–Ankara arrangement that needs to look like it is working while its legal basis is a one-year patch. Use the tanker series and show its sample. And note what Sunday night demonstrated about the fragility of everything this desk counts in barrels and gigawatts.