Iraq sets plan to compensate for excess Opec oil output

Iraq, Opec's second-largest oil producer, has submitted a plan to the Opec secretariat outlining how it will compensate for producing above quota in the first quarter of 2024.

The plan indicates that Baghdad will make compensatory cuts from May through to the end of this year, although its breakdown could be tweaked if its April production is again above quota, based on average production estimates issued by the seven Opec secondary sources, including Argus.

Opec+'s Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) said in its 3 April meeting that members that have produced above their quotas so far this year would need to submit plans to compensate for the excess. Iraq and Kazakhstan, which Opec said has also submitted its own compensation plan, have produced the most excess excess volumes in the Opec+ group since the beginning of the year. The JMMC oversees compliance to the coalition's crude production cuts and studies market dynamics.

Iraq produced 194,000 b/d above target in January, and overshot by 217,000 b/d and 193,000 b/d in February and March, respectively. To compensate for this, Baghdad plans to produce 50,000 b/d below its quota between May and September, 100,000 b/d below quota for October and November, and 152,000 b/d below its quota for December. Iraq has been working to a quota of 4mn b/d since the start of the year, including two rounds of voluntary cuts it made in April and November last year.

Baghdad will submit its crude production figure for April later this week, it said. Any extra volumes produced will also be factored into the country's compensation plan.

To meet obligations, Baghdad says it will cap its crude burn at 75,000 b/d and maintain refining intake to between 400,000 b/d and 500,000 b/d through to the end of this year, according to Iraq's Opec national representative Mohammed Adnan Ibrahim Al-Najjar. But Iraq has yet to decide whether it will extend a 3.3mn b/d cap on exports, in place since April, beyond the second half, as it will depend on "Opec+ agreements [in the June meeting] and [the needs of] Iraq's economy over the coming months," the oil ministry told Argus last week.

When needs must

With the summer season around the corner in the Mideast Gulf region, Iraq has pushed the majority of its compensation into the last three months of the year. Iraq in summer often experiences extreme heatwaves resulting in a major spike in electricity demand. Power shortages during the summer season have fuelled political unrest in Iraq in recent years.

To strike a balance between its Opec+ commitments and avoid similar scenarios this year, Iraq says it will import higher levels of gas from neighbouring Iran, with Baghdad also beginning to benefit from electricity supply from Jordan through a newly-established power line which became operational at the beginning of April. Iran and Iraq finalised a five-year supply agreement at the end of March, which will see Tehran send "up to 50mn m³/d" of gas to Iraq, Iraq's electricity minister Ziad Ali Fadel said.

But Iraq's persistent overproduction, which has drawn scrutiny within Opec+, might be difficult to address, especially as Iraq blames it on its inability to oversee production in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in the north of the country.

Most Iraqi Kurdish crude output is directed to local refineries or sold on the black market following the closure of the export pipeline that links oil fields in northern Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan just over a year ago. Iraq's federal oil ministry says its Kurdish counterpart has stopped providing production data, but on 3 May said it estimates Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) crude production to be between 40,000 b/d and 50,000 b/d.

Meanwhile, Iraq's oil minister Hayyan Abdulghani on 2 May announced that two joint Baghdad-Erbil committees have been formed to resolve the issue of contracts between Erbil and the international oil companies operating in the Kurdistan region.

By Bachar Halabi