"On Wednesday, the pipeline delivered a trickle of 84,000 barrels to Ceyhan. That flow continued on Thursday despite the seizure of Kirkuk, with 111,000 barrels arriving in Ceyhan," reported the Energy Intelligence Briefing, a publication of the authoritative EIG.

"The continuation of the flow indicates that at least some of the Kirkuk fields are still producing oil. Storage tanks at Ceyhan now hold 8.3 million barrels of usable Iraqi crude," it added.

The Iraqi oil stored in Ceyhan cannot be exported as communication with Iraq's state-oil marketer Somo was lost and no other party is legally empowered legally to sell it.

"In the early days of the war, the pipeline carried close to its typical 700,000-800,000 barrels per day (bpd), but volumes have dropped to around 100,000 bpd since. There were only two days on which no oil was transported at all through the pipeline, April 5 and April 7."

"The pipeline has delivered over 4 million barrels of Kirkuk crude to Ceyhan since the fighting started three weeks ago," it continued.

Kirkuk accounted for around one third of Iraq's pre-war output of some 2.7 million barrels per day, with southern oilfields producing the rest.

The US-led coalition seized the southern fields in the first days of the war, reporting little damage.

Turkey, wary that oil wealth would lead make an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq viable, said Thursday it had won a pledge from Washington to remove from Kirkuk the Kurdish forces who have captured the city.

SPACE.WIRE