Kurdistan loses 1,000 MW as Dana Gas cuts supply to power stations

ERBIL — Electricity generation in the Kurdistan Region has fallen by 1,000 megawatts after Dana Gas reduced natural gas deliveries to power stations, the KRG Electricity Ministry has said.

The ministry said it and the Ministry of Natural Resources were in contact with the company to restore deliveries and generation to normal. It did not say how much gas had been cut, what caused it or how long it would last.

Dana Gas had not issued a public statement as of Wednesday morning.

Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum operate Khor Mor in Sulaymaniyah governorate, the main fuel source for power generation across the Region, piped to stations including Chamchamal, Bazian and Erbil and supporting more than 2,000 MW. The loss is around half of what the field carries.

Khor Mor underpins the KRG’s Runaki programme, which supplies round-the-clock public electricity and has been phasing out the neighbourhood diesel generators that households elsewhere in the country rely on to cover outages.

Generation across the Region fell by 2,500 MW in July when Dana Gas halted primary production at Khor Mor over what it called credible security threats. The field’s processing capacity rose to 750 million standard cubic feet a day after the KM250 expansion entered service in October last year, and in August the operators began supplying 100 million cubic feet a day to the federal Electricity Ministry’s Taza station in Kirkuk under a one-year agreement.