Iraq’s campaign for a larger OPEC production allocation has taken a complicated turn after Oil Minister Basim Mohammed Khudair said the country is already producing more than 5 million barrels per day, more than half a million barrels above its current OPEC+ requirement, OilPrice.com reported. Six days earlier Baghdad joined six other OPEC+ producers in agreeing to maintain current production requirements for December, leaving Iraq at 4.431 million barrels a day, and shortly after Khudair’s statement the Oil Ministry reaffirmed Iraq’s commitment to that ceiling, saying October production had increased but giving no figure.
Khudair said Iraq remained compliant because its exports were within what he described as the group’s export ceiling. But Iraq’s 4.431 million barrel requirement is a production target, not an export target, and OPEC assesses compliance using crude oil production based on estimates from independent secondary sources. Exports and production can differ significantly, since crude can be refined domestically, burned for power, or moved into storage, so Iraq could export less than its requirement and still produce more than it.
The minister’s number is also difficult to reconcile with the independent data available so far. Iraq reported production of 4.399 million barrels a day to OPEC in September, so output would have had to rise by at least 601,000 barrels a day in October or early November to reach the level described. The IEA estimated September production lower, at 4.10 million barrels a day, and put Iraq’s sustainable production capacity at 4.87 million barrels a day, below the level Khudair says the country is actually producing. Exports did recover, to about 3.5 million barrels a day in October from 2.65 million in September, according to Iraqi energy officials.
Baghdad has spent months trying to persuade OPEC to recognise substantially more Iraqi production capacity, seeking a future baseline based on capacity of around 6 million barrels a day while OPEC independently assesses members’ maximum sustainable capacity for its 2027 framework. OPEC has yet to publish its first secondary-source estimate for October, leaving no independent figure that confirms the increase Khudair described.