Iraq’s plan to increase oil output this year will go ahead, with exports running in January at a record level and unaffected by Iran’s return to the market, Iraqi Oil Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, expects output from the country’s southern region to increase by up to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year, to over 4 million bpd, he said, speaking in Baghdad. Iraq will be offering competitive prices to market its additional crude output, the minister said, adding that it had made contracts with Chinese refineries covering all of 2016. “In fact, we in Iraq are not short of contracts,” he said. “Until now, the demand on our […]