KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait and Qatar are looking to use the Iraqi pipelines as an alternate route for oil and gas shipments north through Kurdistan to a Turkish port for export, but nothing has been finalized, reports Al-Anba daily.

The daily quoting oilandgas360.com said “Disrupting the oil trade could send oil prices upward, making it more expensive for Americans to fill up their gas tanks as part of Iran’s plan to make the US and its allies feel economic pain.”
The Trump administration imposed economic sanctions on Iran in 2018 that the Obama administration had previously removed. Those sanctions are hitting Iranian oil exports hard and squeezing the country’s economy. Iran wants to make the US and its allies feel economic pain in an effort to divide the international community over sanctions.

Iran sees hampering crude oil shipments in the Straits of Hormuz as part of that strategy. More than 18.5 million barrels of oil and petroleum liquids per day moved through the Straits of Hormuz from the Arabian Gulf in 2016, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), making it the world’s largest maritime oil choke point and vulnerable to bad actors.