Firefighters Battle Fire at Turkish-Iraqi Pipeline, Transmission Stops

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The shipping of oil from the Turkish-Iraqi oil pipeline halted due to a fire that broke out on the Turkish side of the border. According to a statement from the Energy Ministry of Turkey, the fire broke out in Turkey's Sirnak province near the border town of Silopi, and firefighters and security forces are trying to extinguish it. The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline is currently carrying about a quarter of Iraq's total oil exports. An Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman said Iraq had halted exports due to the fire.

Due to declining export volumes of crude pumped from northern Iraq's mature Kirkuk oil field, normal throughput through the pipeline, not including contributions from Iraqi Kurdistan, stands at less than a third of the export line's 1.6 million-barrel-per-day capacity. The pipeline, which exported 300,000 barrels per day last month, is frequently shut down due to sabotage. On August 6, 2012, the pipeline was also closed for few days because of an explosion at a part inside Turkey.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been conducting a low-level guerrilla war in southeastern Turkey since 1984 and has recently stepped up attacks in the region, a move widely ascribed to be linked to the breakdown of Syrian state control in the Kurdish region of northeast Syria. The PKK has targeted the pipeline in the past, calling it a strategic target. In 2008, the PKK claimed responsibility for an explosion that closed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline for a month.

The British oil giant British Petroleum Plc (NYSE:BP) (London, England) is a 30% stakeholder in the BTC pipeline, which carries Azeri crude from Baku in Azerbaijan to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline is pumping 631,000 barrels of oil a day in August 2012.

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