Jordan to receive full quantity of contracted Iraqi oil for March as precaution — Zawati

AMMAN — Energy Minister Hala Zawati on Wednesday announced that the Kingdom, during the first half of March, has received 196,500 barrels of Iraqi oil, stressing that the shipping of Iraqi oil to the Kingdom is ongoing, with a daily rate of 13,100 barrels per day.

As a precautionary measure, Zawati said in a statement, the ministry has arranged with the Iraqi side to raise the number of shipments to the Jordan Petroleum Refinery to receive the full amount that the two sides had contracted to transfer during March 2020.

The total amount of Iraqi crude oil received by the Jordan Petroleum Refinery totalled 2 million barrels from September 2019 up until March 15, she added.

She said that 7,851 tankers transported Iraqi crude oil overland from September 2019 until the middle of March.

Iraqi crude oil is sold to Jordan based on the average monthly price of Brent crude, from which the difference in transport costs and the difference in specifications are deducted, the statement said.

In January 2019, Iraq approved a plan to provide Jordan with 10,000 barrels of oil daily from Baiji in Iraq to the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company through tankers.

The tender for transporting the crude oil was floated by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in March 2019 in implementation of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between Jordan and Iraq in early February of last year to import Iraqi oil.

Under the MoU, the oil covers 7 per cent of the Kingdom’s daily demand.