27 June 2006
Kazakhstan has officially joined the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline after the Kazakh and Azeri Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Ilham Aliyev signed an agreement in Almaty on June 16, 2006.
Kazakhstan has officially joined the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline after the Kazakh and Azeri Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Ilham Aliyev signed an agreement in Almaty on June 16, 2006. Until recently, Kazakhstan has been exporting oil west via numerous pipelines through Russia, including the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s pipeline to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, and a pipeline eastward to China. The new pipeline will provide oil producers in Kazakhstan, including many Western oil firms, an opportunity to ship oil in a southwestern direction, reaching all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
The length of the BTC pipeline is 1,767 kilometers (443 kilometers in Azerbaijan, 248 kilometers in Georgia, and 1,076 kilometers in Turkey). Under the agreement, Kazakh crude oil will be shipped from Aktau to Baku across the Caspian by tankers, then pumped through the BTC pipeline all the way to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The pipeline’s total annual throughput is 50 million tons, or roughly one million barrels per day. Kazakhstan is currently expected to ship 7.5 million tons of oil a year and later expand the shipment to 25 million tons.