Turkish pipeline to reopen in one week

GUERRILLA ATTACK: A section of the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline has been set ablaze by a bomb attack. (Getty Images)

Iraq expects the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline linking Iraq and Turkey to be reopened in a week, the country's oil ministry spokesman said on Saturday, after it was damaged in a bomb attack a day earlier.

"It will definitely take more than 48 hours to fix, but no longer than a week," he said, adding that the estimation was based on previous experience with damaged pipelines in Iraq, and not from reports on the attack in Turkey.

Baghdad also expects loading of oil shipments at Ceyhan to be unaffected despite a halt in pumping from Iraq, spokesman Asim Jihad said.

"This will not affect exports because there is enough in storage. Exports are made from storage, so just because the pipeline is closed doesn't mean exports have stopped," he said.

A fire on the pipeline, which usually carries about 400,000 barrels of oil from Iraq to Turkey a day, was still ablaze but under control on Saturday after it was ignited by an apparent Kurdish guerrilla bomb attack, a Turkish energy ministry source told newswire Reuters.

The timing of the pipeline's reopening will only be determined once the fire is extinguished, the source said.

A shipping source said there were 4.3 million barrels in storage at Ceyhan on Friday. Two ships were due to arrive in the next week to load a total of two million barrels.

One ship was due to arrive on Nov. 24 to load a million barrels for US refiner Valero Energy with a second vessel due on Nov. 27 to load another million barrels for Moroccan refiner Samir.

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