Iraqi Northern Pipeline bombed on Saturday. Resuming operations today.

Iraq's Northern Pipeline which has a capacity of 400,000 - 500,000 B/D and ships to the Turkish port of Ceyhan was bombed by unknown parties on Saturday. The story was only sparcely mentioned in the mainstream media but did get covered by the Iraqi news service which put out the following release:

Iraq to resume pumping oil from Kirkuk towards Ceyhan today

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 08:51 GMT


Iraq's deputy oil minister Abdul Karim Al Luaibi said that Iraq expects to resume oil exports from Kirkuk to Turkey today. The pipeline was shut Saturday by sabotage, he added. Earlier on Saturday, Kirkuk oil flow towards Ceyhan Turkish port was halted. It is to be noted that November flow rate was of 404000 barrels per day.


إقرأ هذا المقال باللغة بالعربية

Apparently the pipeline is already repaired and ready to resume shipments. This shows just how easily pipelines are repaired and why the Nigerian attack last Saturday (the same day) was not a big deal.

Zerohedge has a piece on the pipeline story which I've included below. It is covered in their usual conspiratorial fashion. I think their suggestion that the PKK might be behind the bombing is misplaced. The pipeline benefits the Iraqi Kurds and it appears unlikely that the PKK would do anything to hurt their Iraqi compatriots. "Dead Enders" (i.e. former Bathists from Saddam Hussein's regime), Sunni militants or Iranian agents are more likely culprits. The outage was so short that it is unlikely to have any impact on the crude market although this is the first time that the Northern pipeline has been bombed in quite a while so this could be important if it is a sign of things to come.

Here is the ZeroHedge story:

The Real Iraqi Crude Story (Hint: It Ain't Iran)
Submitted by Marla Singer on 12/22/2009 09:55 -0500

Crude European Union Exports hedge Iran Iraq Media Oil Turkey United States Wrong Zero Hedge


Sadly, media misfeasance (or malfeasance) has become such a common experience that it begins to look like a go-to story on Zero Hedge during slow news cycles. All we can say is that despite its increasingly droll repetition, we think media degradation in all its forms an important issue. So when, just for instance, the mainstream media jumps all over the Iranian "invasion" of Iraq to seize oil wells, despite the fact that the seizure of the well itself is only one of a rather unremarkable series of similar incidents in exactly the same disputed area going back years, and at the same time totally ignores the much more serious news of terrorist attacks on Iraqi pipelines that actually halt about 400,000 barrels per day of crude flow, well, we are just not that surprised anymore. One has to go to Alsumaria, Iraq's satellite channel, to find this story today:

Iraq's deputy oil minister Abdul Karim Al Luaibi said that Iraq expects to resume oil exports from Kirkuk to Turkey today. The pipeline was shut Saturday by sabotage, he added. Earlier on Saturday, Kirkuk oil flow towards Ceyhan Turkish port was halted. It is to be noted that November flow rate was of 404000 barrels per day.

This particular bit of oversight cannot simply be explained away by the lack of a compelling narrative either. The area in question is known for its friendly refuge for the activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (hereinafter the "PKK"). Yes, the same separatist (and if you adopt the definition used by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Iraq, Iran, Syria and, of course, Turkey also "terrorist") PKK that gives Turkey fits. One would think that the PKK's potential involvement in the (apparently effective) sabotage of oil assets in the region, or at least the sabatoge in a region known for PKK activity, on a Turkish conected pipeline would be worth noting, particularly where a pipeline cut disrupted serious pipeline flows for days. One would think wrong.