Iraq rebounds from temporary oil field outages

BASRA - Iraq appears to be overcoming temporary outages at two southern oil fields and avoiding major disruptions to its overall oil production.

The West Qurna 2 field — whose roughly 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) went offline starting Feb. 21 due to planned maintenance — is now scheduled to restart operations on March 9, according to a senior official at the state-run Basra Oil Company (BOC), which is sooner than previously expected. A senior official at the field said the restart date is more likely March 12.