Iraq's crude oil exports in September slipped 8.2% to 1.644 million barrels a day from 1.780 million barrels a day in August, a senior Iraqi oil official said Monday.
The country exported a total of 1.321 million barrels a day from southern oil fields via the Basra oil terminal, the official told Dow Jones Newswires by telephone from Baghdad. Some 320,000 barrels a day were exported from northern oil fields via the Turkish Ceyhan port in the Mediterranean, he said.
The remaining 3,000 barrels a day were exported by trucks to Jordan, the official said.
Iraq's average crude oil exports since the beginning of January up to the end of September stood at 1.880 million barrels a day, the official said.
The official said some technical problems to oil facilities in southern Iraq had caused the reduction in Iraq's oil exports in September. "The strong storm that happened during the month had damaged some of the crude oil storage facilities near Basra."
There was also a technical fault to the main pipeline carrying crude from the fields to Basra export terminal, he said. Iraq usually exports an average of 1.56 million barrels a day from oil terminals in Basra in southern Iraq.
The decrease in Iraq's exports from northern oil fields, which usually stands at 400,000 barrels a day, was caused by sabotage to an export pipeline in northern Iraq, the Iraqi oil ministry's spokesman Assem Jihad had said last month.
The first oil official declined to say whether these problems had been fixed or not.
He predicted that Iraq's crude oil exports in October would stay lower than their usual levels but he didn't elaborate.