Iraqi Oil Tanker Starts Unloading 31,000 Tons of Fuel at Lebanese Ports

The Lebanese Ministry of Energy and Water began unloading the first shipment of fuel coming from Iraq after ensuring that the shipment complied with the  Lebanese specifications.

The tanker has arrived in Lebanon loaded with 31,000 tons of natural gas within the agreement signed by the General Directorate of Oil in Lebanon with the Iraqi side in Baghdad on July 24.

The ship is scheduled to unload 15,000 tons of its cargo into the tanks of the Deir Ammar power plant in northern Lebanon, and it will unload 16,000 tons at the Zahrani power station in southern Lebanon.

Lebanon is waiting at the end of this month for the fuel oil ship of Class B for engines, as part of a group of ships within the agreement between Lebanon and Iraq to supply Electricité du Liban with up to 60,000 tons of fuel and natural gas per month for a year.

Lebanon suffers badly from a severe crisis in electrical energy, as feeding the government network to homes and facilities does not exceed 4 hours per day at the present time at the latest, while the country has gone through periods in which the electrical supply was completely cut off for several consecutive days in many regions.

On the twenty-fourth of last August, the Lebanese caretaker government decided to activate a joint operations room that includes representatives of all security services and ministries concerned with fuel, provided that its headquarters will be in the Grand Serail (the seat of the Council of Ministers); to follow up on the mechanisms for distributing fuel after it is available in the market today, according to the new support mechanisms.

This came in a meeting held on the 24th of July under the chairmanship of Dr. Hassan Diab, the caretaker prime minister and in the presence of the Ministers of Defense, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Energy, representatives of the Attorney General and the Lebanese Army, Director of the Internal Security Forces Major General Imad Othman, Director General of Public Security Major General Abbas Ibrahim, Director General of State Security Major General Tony Saliba and Director of Intelligence Brigadier General Antoine Kahwagi, Director General of Customs Raymond Khoury, and a number of senior officials to study the fuel distribution mechanism and follow-up.