Azerbaijan, Baku, Dec. 18 / Trend /
The Turkish Ceyhan terminal began loading 1,000 oil tankers under the export of oil via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, BP (operator of the pipeline) reported.
The tanker "British Kestrel" (1000th oil tanker) will go to Rotterdam with 600,000 barrels of oil.
BTC transports mainly Azeri Light and small volumes of Kazakh oil from the Tengiz field. The BTC's maximum capacity is 1.2 million barrels of oil per day.
So far, the pipeline has transported 791 million barrels of oil (about 106 million tons). At present, this route transports about 850,000 barrels of oil per day.
The total length of BТС is 1.768 kilometers including the 443 kilometer section running via Azerbaijan, the 249 kilometer section via Georgia and the 1.076 kilometer via Turkey. Construction of the pipeline began in April 2003 and it was filled with oil on May 18, 2005.
Around $4bln has been spent for the construction of BTC not including fill-up of pipeline, financial expenses and payment of the bank rates. The credit allocated for the project totaled $2.6bln.
The shareholders of BTC are BP (30.1%), AzBTC (25%), Chevron (8.90%), StatoilHydro (8.71%), TRAO (6.53%), Eni (5%), Total (5%), Itochu (3.40%), Inpex (2.50%), ConocoPhilips (2.50%) and Hess (2.36%).