BASRA/LONDON, 13 August 2003 — Iraq’s Basra refinery has resumed operations after power supply was restored but intermittent disruptions again halted exports at Iraq’s sole crude terminal Mina Al-Bakr, officials said yesterday. Basra and the surrounding districts of southern Iraq have been plagued by power cuts and fuel shortages which sparked violent protests over the weekend.
The delays at Iraq’s sole export terminal have set back schedules and cast doubt on targets while the refinery outages have exacerbated the fuel shortages, industry sources said. “The loadings have stopped because of electricity failure. We pumped for five hours earlier,” a port official told Reuters.
At the 140,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Basra refinery, where a power cut forced it to shut down at the weekend, the director of the refinery’s engineering unit told Reuters the plant restarted on Tuesday after power was restored at 2 p.m. (1000 GMT). “We began the startup of the refinery process about an hour after that,” Jamal Samman said. “But we are still only in the early stages of startup.”
The US-led administration in Iraq blames sabotage, fuel smuggling and the breakdown of decrepit equipment for the energy crisis in southern Iraq.
In an effort to ease the petrol shortage, authorities have moved one of four gasoline tankers that have been waiting for a month to discharge at Umm Qasr, to a military port to begin offloading. Shipments at Umm Qasr were halted after an accident.
“One of the tankers has been moved to Al-Zubair to begin discharge but because it’s a military port we can’t tell if this has started,” one Gulf-based shipping source with agents at Umm Qasr told Reuters.
At Mina Al-Bakr, the official said the brief pumping was at a rate of 18,000 barrels per hour — a fraction of its pre-war capacity of 85,000 bph — and the crude was loaded onto a tanker chartered by Shell - the Kyrakatingo. That cargo had been initially expected to sail on around Aug. 10-11.
The power cuts have pushed back lifting dates for all first half of August cargoes but Iraqi officials have told customers they believe the slowdown can be compensated before month’s end. “They’re behind now, but they’re telling us they’re confident they can catch up,” said one lifter.
The State Oil Marketing Organization decline to put any figures on expected August supplies yesterday but in the past has said some 645,000 bpd would lift. “If the electricity resumes, we resume exports immediately,” SOMO chief Mohammed Al-Jiboury told Reuters. He also said crude exports would increase next month but did not give a figure.
Before the war, Mina Al-Bakr handled about two-thirds of Iraq’s total exports, running at up to 1.2 million bpd, while more than 800,000 bpd was exported north from Kirkuk.
The pipeline linking those fields with Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal has been repeatedly bombed in the past months and has yet to resume operations since the war.