MOSCOW (MRC) -- Iraq expects total oil production to average 3.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in February if the autonomous Kurdistan region abides by OPEC+ oil production cuts, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar's statement.
An average of 2.9 million bpd in exports were expected, he told a news briefing in Baghdad.
The minister said he anticipated an oil price of USD58 to USD63 in 2021. He also said OPEC and its allies were expected to keep their output policy, to which Iraq remains committed, unchanged during their next meeting.
He said Iran might return to the oil market if everything remained "normal", without elaborating.
As MRC wrote before, Indian Oil Corp (IOC) , the country's top refiner, has loaded its first cargo of Iraq's newly introduced Basra Medium crude grade, according to ship tracking data from Refinitiv Eikon. IOC loaded the cargo onto Minerva Kalypso, a suezmax-sized vessel, which left Iraq's southern port of Basra on Jan. 4, the data showed. The ship was expected to arrive at Chennai port in southeastern India for IOC's subsidiary Chennai Petroleum Corp (CPCL) around Jan. 14.
We remind that India’s top refiner Indian Oil Corp has been operating at 100% capacity since early November, 2020, as local fuel demand has recovered, its chairman S.M. Vaidya said late last year. IOC has been gradually raising crude runs at its plants, which plunged to about 39% at the beginning of April, 2020, when a nationwide coronavirus lockdown hit fuel demand.
We also remind that IOC is expanding its petrochemical capacity by more than 70% from its current 3.2 million tonnes a year. It is also on new technologies that reduces the cost of producing petrochemicals.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020).
MRC