Azerbaijan, Baku, September 23 / Trend E. Ismayilov /
Roughly 15.4 billion cubic meters of gas have been transported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline from the date it was commissioned to Sept. 20 this year, SOCAR first vice-president Khoshbakht Yusifzade said in an interview posted on the official website of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party.
Gas from the Shah Deniz gas condensate field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea is exported via the pipeline.
The 20bcm-per-year, 971km Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline was commissioned in October 2007.
Yusifzade said that roughly 13.7 billion cubic meters of gas was transported to Turkey via the pipeline, while roughly 1.2 billion cubic meters of gas was transported to Georgia.
Azerbaijan has been exporting gas to Iran since November 2005. Gas is supplied to Iran on the basis of swap operations to meet the needs of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which is under siege as a result of Armenian occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijani lands. SOCAR has started exporting gas to Russia in 2010.
Currently, the work on several projects to supply Azerbaijani gas to Europe is underway. In this regard Yusifzade named such gas pipeline projects as ITGI (Turkey-Greece-Italy), Nabucco, Trans Gas Pipeline (TAP), White Stream, as well as projects to supply compressed and liquefied gas through Georgia and the Black Sea to Bulgaria and Romania.
All gas pipeline projects in the direction of Europe under consideration by Azerbaijan are focused on natural gas from Shah Deniz.
The contract to develop Shah Deniz was signed on June 4, 1996. Participants to the agreement are: BP (operator) - 25.5 percent, Statoil Hydro - 25.5 percent, NICO - 10 percent, Total - 10 percent, LukAgip - 10 percent, TPAO - 9 percent, and SOCAR - 10 percent.
It is planned to extract 7,84 billion cubic meters of gas in this field this year.
Peak production is expected to hit 8,6-9 billion cubic meters during the first stage, which is already underway. Implementation of the second stage of the project will increase annual production from the field up to 25 billion cubic meters.