Iran and Iraq have reached an agreement to soon settle their disputes regarding the amount of natural gas delivered by Iran to Iraq and the arrears the Arab country owes to Iran for previous deliveries.
Iran’s Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad said on Saturday after a meeting in Tehran with Iraqi Electricity Minister Ziad Fadhil that Iran and Iraq had concluded discussions on how to sort out disputes under a gas supply contract that exists between the two countries.
“We will soon witness a settlement of both issues, namely the quantity of the gas exports to Iraq and also the repayment of the arrears,” Paknejad was quoted as saying in a report by the Ministry’s news service Shana.
The report did not elaborate on further details about the agreement.
Iran is a major supplier of natural gas to Iraq as the Arab country relies on gas imported from Iran for 43% of electricity generation in its power plants.
Direct electricity imports from Iran also account for up to 10% of Iraq’s domestic demand for power.
However, US sanctions on Iran have made it difficult for Baghdad to settle payments for Iranian gas, causing Tehran to reduce supply volumes from time to time, which has led to bouts of electricity shortages in Iraq.
The United States announced in early March that it had revoked a waiver from its Iran sanctions that allowed Iraq to pay for electricity imports from its eastern neighbor. That comes as a years-long US waiver for Iraq to import natural gas from Iran is still in place.
Iran supplies up to 50 million cubic meters (mcm) of natural gas and 1 gigawatt of electricity to Iraq every day.
Iraq is also supposed to receive up to 20 mcm per day of gas from Turkmenistan via the Iranian pipelines, but authorities in the Arab country say US sanctions have blocked the supplies from reaching Iraq.
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