Iraq trucks Basrah crude north to Ceyhan as Erbil faces a doubled export demand

Oilprice.com reported on 2 November that Iraqi exports via the Ceyhan pipeline had risen to 500,000 barrels per day, with Baghdad trucking Basrah crude north into the pipeline system to bypass shipping disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. The figure comes from an aggregation-leaning outlet and has not been confirmed by SOMO in anything available to this desk; the trucking detail, if it holds, is the more consequential half of the report, because moving southern crude overland to the Mediterranean carries a substantial per-barrel cost and amounts to a priced judgement by Baghdad on Hormuz risk. The line restarted only in September 2025 after a two-and-a-half-year halt; in November 2025, Kurdish crude via Ceyhan totalled 5,834,864 barrels within total Iraqi exports of more than 110 million barrels, per SOMO’s monthly statement. Iraq and Türkiye agreed a one-year temporary export protocol on 3 July 2026.

That shift reframes the budget fight. Kurdistan24 reported that the cabinet was to devote its 10 November meeting to the draft 2027 federal budget, with the Region’s share, salary funding and a required KRG export of 450,000 bpd unresolved; this desk has not confirmed what the cabinet decided, or whether a vote occurred. The demanded volume is close to double the 230,000 bpd the KRG committed to deliver to SOMO under the three-month arrangement reported by Rudaw in January 2026, plus 50,000 bpd additional. Erbil’s own accounting in that report claims it received 41 per cent of its federal budget share over three years, no investment allocations, and ten months' pay for employees in 2025; Baghdad’s framing, via Shafaq on 17 October, is that federal funds covered roughly one month in three of Kurdish public-sector salaries since 2014. On 3 November, al-Zaidi’s office said he had told KDP lawmakers he would guarantee Kurdish salaries on par with other governorates.

The Region’s physical position weakened in the same window. A drone attack on 8 November struck the Khor Mor gas field in Chamchamal district, Sulaymaniyah province, suspending production and causing a mass blackout across the Kurdistan Region, according to Al Jazeera. Reuters attributed the targeting to two security sources. No party has claimed responsibility in any reporting located here, and no operator statement, restoration timeline or load-loss figure was available at the time of writing.

Assessment: The negotiating table has moved without either delegation leaving it. For a decade Erbil’s leverage was that the pipeline to Ceyhan only had value if Kurdish barrels filled it. Trucked Basrah crude breaks that premise: Baghdad can now demonstrate throughput without Erbil’s consent, while asking Erbil for roughly double its last committed volume. Distrust both sets of salary statistics — each is a finance ministry arguing its own case — and distrust the 500,000 figure until SOMO prints it. Khor Mor matters less as an attack than as a reminder that the Region’s generating capacity is a single undefended point, and that whoever hit it understood the budget calendar.