Türkiye and Iraq are close to signing a deal that keeps Iraqi crude running to the Mediterranean for another year. Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said so in Baghdad on Wednesday, and he was specific about the clock.
"We have brought to its final stage an agreement covering the next 12 months that will ensure the process continues without interruption," Bayraktar said after meeting Iraq's oil minister, Basim Mohammed Khudair, and Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, according to Anadolu Ajansı. "We aim to sign it in the coming days and share it with the public." Oil flow from Iraq to Ceyhan, he added, will continue.
The reason for the one-year window is a deadline. The current pipeline agreement between the two governments runs out toward the end of this month, Bayraktar said. Western and regional outlets, including The National, put the expiry at 27 July. So the 12-month protocol is a bridge. It keeps crude moving while Ankara, Baghdad, and Erbil work on a full replacement framework, which is the harder negotiation and the one nobody has finished yet.
Bayraktar used the Baghdad trip to sell a bigger idea. He called the Iraq-Türkiye pipeline a half-century project, running since the 1970s, that Türkiye has kept operational through past incidents and regional instability. On paper it can do far more than it does. The existing infrastructure could carry about 1.5 million barrels a day without major new investment, he said, and the line could eventually be rebuilt into a 2.5 million barrel-a-day route, possibly extended south toward Basra. Those are ambitions he was describing, and the line carries nowhere near that today. The talks also covered natural gas and electricity, and Bayraktar carried a message from President Erdoğan to the Iraqi side.
Behind the pitch sits the map. Nearly all of Iraq's oil leaves through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf chokepoint that a single blockage can seize up, and the past month showed how fast that risk turns real. Bayraktar framed the overland pipeline as the answer to exactly that exposure: a way to reach the Mediterranean at Ceyhan without betting the whole export economy on one narrow passage. It fits inside Türkiye's larger Development Road plan, the corridor Ankara wants to run from Basra up through Iraq and out to Europe.
Here is the part worth remembering when you read that the pipeline is simply "back." It went dark for about two and a half years. Türkiye halted flows in March 2023 after an arbitration tribunal found it had breached the 1973 pipeline agreement by letting Kurdistan Regional Government crude export without Baghdad's sign-off, a ruling that Reuters and others reported carried damages of roughly $1.4 billion. Crude did not move again until around September 2025, after an interim arrangement among Iraq's federal oil ministry, the KRG, and the international companies operating the fields. Regional reporting has put the flows since then somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 250,000 barrels a day, well under what the line was built to carry.
That gap between capacity and reality is the whole story. Baghdad wants the volumes up, Ankara wants the corridor busy, and the current deal expires in a fortnight. As of Wednesday the 12-month protocol was described as final but not signed. Watch for the signing announcement, because until the ink is down, the arrangement holding crude on this route runs out on 27 July.
Update, 14 July. The protocol was still unsigned three days later. Speaking to reporters before a cabinet meeting on 14 July, Bayraktar said the one-year deal, a crude-transport agreement to be signed by the state firm BOTAŞ, was held up by several unresolved points, with Iraq asking for 750,000 barrels a day of reserved capacity on a line that today carries closer to 180,000 to 200,000. He added that Türkiye had told Baghdad a year ago it would not renew the old 2010 pipeline agreement at all, and wants a comprehensive new one instead.
He also corrected the impression that the arbitration is finished. It runs on more than one track, he said. Türkiye lost its bid to annul the 2023 award at the Paris Court of Appeal, but an enforcement case is now underway in Washington, where the interest and the final net balance, Türkiye's own counter-claims included, are still to be set, and a separate arbitration covering the years after 2018 is still running. Ankara's position is that no final figure exists until the Washington court rules.
The fight has turned domestic too. An opposition lawmaker, the CHP's Deniz Yavuzyılmaz, released documents on 12 July arguing the Paris loss makes a roughly $1.47 billion penalty final and recoverable from the officials responsible. A parliamentary-inquiry motion from the CHP and İYİ Parti was voted down on 14 July by the governing AK Party and MHP, whose argument on the floor was the one Bayraktar made in public: that the process is not over.