Kurdistan oil production by Norway’s DNO resurges

The Norwegian DNO oil company on Tuesday announced it increased local sales.

Wladimir van Wilgenburg 2023/12/19 18:32

DNO Logo (PHOTO: company website)

Kurdistan DNO Oil & Gas Tawke Field Peshkhabour Field APIKUR

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – The Norwegian oil company DNO on Tuesday said it had increased the production from its licensed Tawke field in the Kurdistan Region, with its current December average approaching 90,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd), according to a press release by the company.

“That lifts the projected fourth quarter 2023 figure to 65,000 bopd [barrels of oil per day], up from 26,000 bopd in the third quarter and zero production in the second quarter, following closure of the Iraq-Türkiye [Turkey] Pipeline in March 2023,” DNO said.

Oil companies have attempted to reduce costs and losses by selling oil on the local market, after Baghdad ordered the closure of the Kurdistan Region’s oil pipeline on March 25. Baghdad had claimed victory in an arbitration court case against Turkey for allowing Kurdistan Region's oil to be independently marketed outside Iraq.

To compensate, DNO had shifted oil production to storage tanks following the court ruling.

Prior to the halt, the oil company was producing more than 107,000 bopd in 2022, according to company figures.

“These are resilient fields and DNO is a resilient company,” said DNO Executive Chairman Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani. “Even with local sales prices as low as half of those realized from export sales through Türkiye, strong production generates material free cash flow for DNO,” he continued.

He also added that DNO remains confident that the “latest challenges facing DNO and the other international oil companies will be resolved once again and we remain committed to growing our business in Kurdistan as we have over the past two decades.”

The Norwegian DNO company operates several oil fields in the Kurdistan Region, such as the Tawke field and the Peshkhabour field near the Syrian border.

The Norwegian company is also part of the Association of the Petroleum Industry of Kurdistan (APIKUR), among seven other companies, which was founded in 2023 by upstream oil and gas companies active in the Kurdistan Region with the goal of promoting it as an attractive destination for petroleum investment.

Earlier on Dec. 10, APIKUR executives attended a trilateral meeting with Kurdish and Iraqi oil officials, yet no breakthrough agreement was reached on the resumption of Kurdish oil exports through the Ceyhan Pipeline.

Edited by Dastan Muwaffaq