A political breakthrough in Iraq has led to the restart of around 180,000 barrels per day of piped Kurdish oil exports to the Mediterranean region, breathing new life into the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) beleaguered oil sector. Iraq, the KRG and international oil companies (IOCs) struck a landmark deal last week that allowed the Iraq-Turkey pipeline to resume oil flows for the first time in 2½ years. The agreement comes at a time of progress in federal Iraq's oil and gas sector, driven by an improvement in the terms on offer and renewed interest from Western oil majors after years of stasis for the Opec member. Outside the semiautonomous Kurdish region, the Baghdad-Erbil agreement bodes particularly well for BP, which in February finalized its plan to redevelop the giant Kirkuk field, whose exports to the Mediterranean also rely on the Kurdish pipeline system. DNO's nonparticipation explains why exports have yet to approach 230,000 b/d as envisaged in last week's agreement.