Angola’s national oil company Sonangol has restarted production at 10,000 b/d from Iraq’s northern heavy oil field of Qayara south of Mosul. This is considerably lower than the field’s nominal capacity of 25-30,000 b/d. Operator Sonangol had been undertaking a drilling campaign to raise capacity to 50,000 b/d prior to last year’s oil price collapse (MEES, 18 December 2020).
Qayara’s crude had been trucked to Iraq’s southern port of Khor Al-Zubair, but Baghdad stopped the practice in April last year after prices crashed reducing the netback value of the 17.2°API heavy sour crude to just $2/B (MEES, 11 September 2020). The difficult-to-handle grade was also blamed for inflicting infrastructure damage. With the nearby 14,000 b/d Qayara Refinery offline since March according to local media, output is most probably being trucked to the 56,000 b/d Kirkuk Refinery partly refurbished in 2017. (CONTINUED - 340 WORDS)
