Iraq’s government has approached international oil companies operating some of its largest oilfields to reduce production further and they have agreed, Reuters reports, citing an unnamed source from the industry.

An earlier report by Bloomberg said Baghdad had asked BP, which operates the giant Rumaila field in the southern part of the country, by another 10 percent. Rumaila is Iraq’s biggest oil field and produces some 1.5 million barrels of crude daily.

Iraq’s production quota under the latest OPEC+ agreement for production control was 3.6 million bpd, but according to Bloomberg calculations, the country, which is OPEC’s second-largest exporter of oil, exceeded this by as much as 600,000 bpd last month. It was the first month of deep cuts among OPEC+.

Now, according to the Reuters source, Baghdad has agreed with Lukoil to cut an additional 50,000 bpd in output from its average daily at West Qurna-2, after it asked the Russian company to reduce production at the southern field by 70,000 bpd in May. With the additional cuts, output at West Qurna-2 will fall to about 275,000 bpd.

Exxon, which operates West Qurna-1, has agreed to reduce output at the field by another 70,000 bpd, the source also said, which would mean an average daily total of 350,000 bpd from the field  this month. The initial cuts at West Qurna-1 were 50,000 bpd last month.

Iraq has become notorious as a laggard in the OPEC+ production control deals and at the latest meeting of the cartel Saudi Arabia clearly showed it had had enough. The Kingdom, which has been cutting by a million bpd more than its quota, insisted that both Iraq and the other laggard, Nigeria, not only deepened their cuts to their quotas but cut even deeper, to make up for the excess oil they had produced last month over their quotas.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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