BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 22. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline may offer much higher capacity for oil from Kazakhstan, said Vitaly Baylarbayov, Deputy Vice-President of Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR, Trend reports.
He pointed out Azerbaijan expects to ship additional 1.5 million tons of crude oil from Kazakhstan in 2023, as compared to 2022.
Baylarbayov further mentioned that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was originally constructed with additional capacity and was consistently intended to transport oil from Kazakhstan and other countries in Central Asia.
When considering the current quantities of crude oil supplied from Kazakhstan through this route, Baylarbayov expects that the total volumes in 2023 will not surpass 2 million tons per year.
"But the capacity which we can offer is much higher than that and we can talk almost immediately, without substantial investments, of the ability to transship 15 million mt of crude oil," Baylarbayov said.
KazMunayGas JSC and SOCAR signed an agreement providing for the transportation of 1.5 million tons of oil from the Tengiz field per year in the direction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.
The volume of Kazakh oil transported from the port of Aktau to the port of Baku increased by 60.5 tons or 75 percent in April 2023 compared to the previous month - up to 312,600 tons.
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