Drilling in the Kurdistan Region is restarting. The export pipeline reopened in September 2025, and operators that had suspended work have announced new wells and resumed programs. For the supply houses of Erbil and Sulaymaniyah that stock mud chemicals for this work, restart means restocking — and a chance to reconsider where the stock comes from. Ironstone can supply the water-based additive list — PAC-LV, PAC-R, xanthan gum, drilling starch, lost-circulation materials, and the supporting bulk chemicals — verified at the factory and shipped to your routing.
Two practical routings, and the right one depends on your clearance setup. Cargo can come overland through Türkiye — typically sea freight to Mersin, then truck through the Habur border crossing into the Kurdistan Region — or through Umm Qasr in the south and up by road. The southern route crosses from federal jurisdiction into the KRG, which has historically meant a second clearance and, at times, duplicate charges at internal checkpoints; the northern route clears KRG customs once. Procedures between the two administrations have been under unification discussions, but until that is settled in practice, we treat the two routings as genuinely different quotes — tell us which you use, or ask us to price both.
The water-based consumables that every restarted program draws on: filtration-control polymers (PAC-LV and PAC-R), viscosifiers (drilling-grade xanthan gum), drilling starch, and lost-circulation materials in the common size classes. These are exactly the products where China-origin drilling grades are mature and where buying through re-trading intermediaries adds the most unnecessary margin. A supply house does not need to risk its entire stock on a new source — and we do not expect it to: we are a new supplier to this market. Start with one mixed container, test every batch against its certificate of analysis, and expand only if the paper and the powder agree.
The verification is the product. Before shipment you hold the specification and a certificate-of-analysis format referenced to API Spec 13A test methods; at shipment, the real COA for each batch; and on request, an independent inspection at origin — sampling, testing, or container loading supervision — by an international inspection company. Buyers in Iraq face a specific problem: there is no quick public registry lookup to check a foreign counterparty, so the checking has to travel with the goods. Our guide on verifying a Chinese supplier from Iraq sets out the full checklist, whether you buy from us or not.
30% with the order, 70% against shipping documents, in USD. No letter of credit is required — relevant in an environment where correspondent-bank capacity for USD transfers is limited and slow to arrange. The staged structure means most of the cash moves only after the cargo is proven on the water, which protects the buyer in exactly the situation where checking a foreign seller is hardest.