Today KarakudukMunai, the operating company, which is part of the LUKOIL Overseas group in Kazakhstan, held the ceremony of commissioning a railway oil-loading rack with a tank farm.
The throughput capacity of the loading rack is 1 million tons of oil per year. The total cost of the facility is over 15 million dollars. The general contractor was CaspyMunaiKurylys, a Kazakhstan company.
KarakudukMunai is developing Karakuduk, a large oil field in the west of Kazakhstan, 360 km from the regional center of Aktau. The commercial development of the field started in 1998, and LUKOIL overseas joined the project at the end of 2005. The production volume of 2006 was 700 thousand tons of oil.
To the present day the high quality oil of Karakuduk was transported by pipelines blending with the products of other Mangistau fields. This resulted in the decrease in the price per barrel of the Karakuduk oil by 4 dollars on an average. The new railroad oil-loading rack will provide the shipment of oil produced by KarakudukMunai via alternative routes with a significant increase of profitability of sales, LUKOIL reports.
The loading rack is complete with the state-of-the-art equipment, reliable automation systems, as well as systems of control over the gas-air environment; it is equipped with the full fire-fighting complex and meets all requirements of the explosion and fire safety. The operating personnel (20 employees) were trained at the oil loading racks in Atyrau ( Kazakhstan) and Nyagan ( Russia).