Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.3
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
One batch of Azerbaijani oil in the amount of 1 million barrels has been shipped from the port of Ceyhan to Vietnam in January 2020, Ibrahim Ahmadov, deputy head of the public relations and events department at SOCAR, told Trend.
Ahmadov said that the delivery to the port of discharge in Vietnam is expected in early February.
“At the same time, the shipment of the second batch of Azeri Light from the port of Ceyhan, also in the amount of 1 million barrels, is scheduled for early February,” he said.
Vietnam’s state-run Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Co (BSR) inked an agreement with SOCAR in November 2019 to buy 5 million barrels of crude in 2020.
SOCAR Trading will provide 5 million barrels of Azeri Light crude to BSR’s Dung Quat refinery during the first half of 2020.
The company said Azerbaijani crude would also become one of its strategic crude oil products from 2020, following Vietnam’s abolishment of an import tax on crude oil which took effect from November.
Vietnam has been relying more on imported crude due to a slowdown in domestic output as reserves at its existing fields decline.
The country’s crude oil imports during the first 11 months of 2019 rose 66 percent from a year earlier to 7.4 million tons (54.5 million barrels).
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