Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, will start selling crude oil to South Korean refiner SK Energy (096770.SE) from January 2009 after a yearlong suspension, a senior Iraqi oil official said Wednesday.
The move came after SK Energy had expressed willingness to cancel an oil deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government in the hope of resuming imports of Iraqi oil, the official told Dow Jones Newswires.
"SOMO recently signed a six-month term contract with SK Energy to sell it some 30,000 barrels a day as from the beginning of January," he said.
Iraq suspended its crude oil sales to South Korea's largest refiner a year ago when it signed, along with a consortium, a contract to develop the Bazian oil field in Kurdistan, which is locked in a major struggle with Iraq's federal government in Baghdad for control of the country's massive oil resources.
The company angered the Oil Ministry in Baghdad in November 2007 when it agreed to a production-sharing contract with the Kurdish government for Bazian. In response, the ministry suspended its term deal with the refiner of around 90,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
The official said the decision to resume crude sales to SK Energy was taken by the Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani.
Iraq accounted for 5.2% of South Korea's total crude oil imports for the first 10 months in 2007, according to the country's energy ministry.