Iraq’s Oil Ministry has announced it has renewed an agreement with Egypt to supply the North African country with 12 million barrels of crude oil for a year.

The new deal has come into effect from this month, and is ‘part of the keenness of both the countries to enforce bilateral relations and expand the mutual cooperation’, the ministry added in its statement.

The ministry on its website mentioned that it had agreed with the Egyptian side to renew the deal on ‘the same old conditions’, without specifying what the terms of the existing deal are.

According to last year's contract, Iraq exported six cargoes of crude oil with 2 million barrels for each, also amounting to 12 million barrels in total, to Egypt over the course of the year.

The two countries had planned to construct a crude pipeline through Jordan in 2013 that would have allowed Iraq to export 130,000 barrels a day to Egypt. The status of that project is not known by MEED.

MEED had reported that the state-owned Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) had signed a contract with private exploration and production company Kuwait Energy to buy a 10 per cent participating interest in the latter’s Block 9 field in the Basra Governorate in southern Iraq.