OILFIELDS PIPE LINE

Taranaki Daily News, 16 January 1935, Page 7

OILFIELDS PIPE LINE

OPENING BY KING OF IRAQ THROUGH FIVE STATES A COSTLY UNDERTAKING PIPES WEIGH NEARLY TON British Wireless. Rugby, Jan. 14. The pipe-line connecting the Mesopotamian oil fields with the Mediterranean was formally opened to-day at Kirkuk by King Ghazi of Iraq. A fleet of aeroplanes specially chartered for the occasion flew to Kirkuk from Bagdad for the inaugural ceremony. After a speech in Arabic and English the King turned on a tap, starting' oil flowing to the coast through five countries. The pipe line was constructed by the International Iraq Petroleum Company, comprising British, French, American and Dutch interests. Twelve hundred miles of pipe was laid at a cost of £lO,000,000, mostly across barren, waterless desert. The pipe line runs in duplicate from Kirkuk to Laditha, where it divides, the southern branch leading to Haifa in Palestine and the northern to Tripoli on the Lebanon coast. The construction of the line involved the laying of heavy steel pipes, each of which weighed nearly a ton. They had to be hauled by motor transport to wherever they were required. The line starts from near Kirkuk In the oilfield and runs south-west to the Tigris, crossing that river at Fatha, not far from Baiji, the rail-head of the Tigris railway. Fi’om there it continues to Haditha on the Euphrates. Here the line divides and the northern or French fork runs almost due west into Syrian territory to end at Tripoli, while the southern or British fork continues southwestward into Transjordania, then turned north-westward. It crosses the Jordan about 20 miles south of Lake Tiberias, and reaches the sea near Haifa.