Azerbaijan, Baku /corr. Trend S.Aliyev / In the stage of the production of Kashagan oil field, Kazakhstan plans to start with 20mln t/year, Energy and Mineral Resources Deputy Minister Bolat Akchulakov informed Dow Jones Newswires on 28 June during the forum in London.
According to him, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan was only of one of the planned ways to transport oil from Kashagan.
"We can't depend on a single pipeline. It's an issue of diversification of export routes for us so that should something happen with one pipeline we have alternative routes of transportation," Akchulakov said. Kazakhstan is planning to build a port by which to transport its crude oil from the Kashagan oil field. The start of oil production at Kashagan has been delayed until 2010 for environmental and technical reasons.
Akchulakov said that the BP-headed Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli fields can provide all of BTC's 1mln to 1.1mln barrels/day supply but that the capacity can also be increased to 1.4mln barrels/day without further investment. A BP spokesman told Dow Jones that BTC could typically be in a position to receive 200,000 to 400,000 barrels/day of Kazakh oil without requiring additional investment.