Azerbaijan, Baku / corr Trend S.Aliyev / Rashid Javanshir, Executive Director of BTC Company and BP Vice President on Onshore Operations, stated to a news conference on 29 May that BP Azerbaijan, an operator of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan export oil pipeline, is exploring opportunities to increase the design capacity of the pipeline from 1mln barrels a day to 1.2mln barrels a day at the expense of chemical components.
BTC has already exceeded an export rate of 870,000 barrels of oil per day and is on target to achieve one mln barrels per day (approximately 50 mln tonnes per year) in late 2008. At its peak production the Ceyhan terminal will fill up 1-2 tankers per day. Deliveries of Shah Deniz condensate into the BTC pipeline began at the start of the Shah Deniz production earlier this year. Future volumes are expected to include those from other Caspian fields.
Since last June, 131 mln barrels (17.6 mln tonnes or 165 tanker loads) have been exported via BTC. From 1997 to the end of the first quarter of 2007, about 186 mln barrels (282 tanker loads or approximately 25 mln tonnes) of oil (including SOCAR non-ACG oil) was transported via the Northern Route Export Pipeline.
Currently an average of around 100,000 barrels of oil per day is being transported via the r ailway systems of Azerb aijan and Georgia. Since the beginning of the railway transportation to the end of the first quarter of 2007, about 73 mln barrels of oil (9.8 mln tonnes or 122 tankers) had been transported by r ail to Batumi in Georgia.