This paper considers the role of transnational flows of Iraqi oil in shaping the post-war petroleum order and postcolonial sovereignty in Lebanon and Syria. In the years following the Second World War the financial terms of the international oil industry came under strain. Scholars have focused on the challenge from oil-producing states which demanded 50-50 profit-sharing of oil revenues by making claims to natural resource sovereignty. This paper shifts our attention to the transportation of oil as a site of contention between companies and states. It examines negotiations that took place in the 1950s between the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) and Syria and Lebanon to establish a transit fee for the operation of the Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipelines. The IPC, an international oil consortium, had been exporting oil by pipeline from northern Iraq across Syria to the port of Tripoli on the Lebanese coast since the 1930s. The IPC’s transit operations rested on rights and privileges granted by French colonial administrations, including exemption from taxation. Drawing on materials in the IPC archives and the local Arabic press, this paper considers the Lebanese and Syrian governments’ attempt to subject the IPC and its transit operations to sovereign control following independence. Company managers, politicians, and government experts grappled with the problem of assessing the pipeline’s “value” and expressing it in a set of calculations to produce a figure that could be presented as a “transit fee.” I demonstrate how the company defended its exemption from taxation and put formulae to work in managing Lebanese and Syrian demands and maintaining control over the principles governing the operation of the oil industry. Rather than representing the pipeline’s value, I argue that the transit fee acted as a site for the articulation and contestation of visions of postcolonial territorial sovereignty and its relationship to international oil capital.