Iraq/Kurdistan: A Mysterious Oil Tanker Might Hold the Key to Kurdish Independence

Oct 23, 2014 | Matthew Philips, Businessweek
View Original

At any given time, the Gulf of Mexico is crawling with oil tankers, many of them delivering some of the 7.5 million barrels of foreign crude the U.S. imports each day. On July 23 a Greek-owned oil tanker named the United Kalavryta came around the tip of Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. For the previous month, as it crossed the Atlantic, its destination had been Brazil. Now it was headed for Galveston, Texas, a gateway to some of the biggest refineries in the U.S. What made the Kalavryta special was that its cargo was from Kurdistan, the semiautonomous region in northern Iraq that boasts an estimated 45 billion barrels of oil reserves. The Kurds contend it’s theirs to produce and sell as they choose. The government in Baghdad disagrees.