Azerbaijan, baku, 11 February / Trend / Since its first transportation produced from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field, about 40.3mln tons of Azerbaijani light oil have been exported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) reported. The total number of tankers transported oil from Ceyhan totalled 376.
In January, about 3mln tons of oil was transported through the pipeline. Some 28.02mln tons of Azerbaijani oil was transported through the route in 2007.
The BP-operated BTC is used for the transportation of light oil produced from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli fields. Only two foreign participants in the project of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field development - US companies ExxonMobil and Devon deliver their oil via the BTC. These companies were not investors in the BTC construction and sell their oil via the Georgian port of Batumi, supplied by the railway.
The total BТС length is 1.768km, including the 443km section running via Azerbaijan, the 249km section via Georgia and the 1.076km via Turkey. The pumping capacity of the pipeline is over 50mln tons of oil (1mln barrels of oil per day). Next year the discharge capacity will expand to 1.2mln barrels of oil a day, at the expense of pumping the chemical reagents.
A total of $4bln has been spent to construct the BTC 1,768km pipeline, not including the fulfillment of the pipeline, financial expenses and payment of the bank rates. The credit allocated for the project totalled $2.6bln.
BTC Company Shareholders includes: BP (30.1%); AzBTC (25%); Chevron (8.90%); Statoil Hydro (8.71%); ТРАО (6.53%); Eni (5%); Total (5%); Itochu (3.40%); Inpex (2.50%); ConocoPhillips (2.50%) and Amerada Hess (2.36%).