Pipeline brings $2.5 billion in two years
Posted by meb at June 8th, 2008
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Crude Oil Pipeline (BTC) which carries Caspian oil to world markets through Turkey, recorded $2.5 billion in revenue within two years, authorities said Friday.
Works on the pipeline, which started delivering Caspian oil on June 2, 2006, are progressing successfully, authorities from BOTAŞ International Limited (BIL), the manager of the BTC Crude Oil Pipeline’s Turkey branch told the Anatolia news agency.
The amount of crude oil transferred from the Haydar Aliyev Marine Terminal, the starting point of the line in Ceyhan in Adana province on the southeastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, reached 385.100 million barrels as of June 4. Some 490 tankers were used to transfer the oil.
Based on a price of $90 per barrel for crude oil, the revenue Turkey obtained from the line reached $2.5 billion. Out of this income, $2.27 billion belonged to the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, or TPAO. The revenues of BIL’s management, the Treasury’s taxes and port services totaled $134.78 million, $77.02 million and $15 million respectively.
Capacity trial successful
The attempts to increase the pipeline’s daily capacity to 1.05 million barrels were successful, said the authorities. However, the current average daily capacity still remains at 750,000 barrels. The target is to reach 840,000 barrels by the end of the year, according to the statement.
The aim to reach 1 million barrels a day solely depends on oil production in the Caspian Sea, the authorities said and added that infrastructure activities to reach 1.2 million barrels are ongoing.
With the BTC Project, worth approximately $3.4 billion, crude oil produced in Azerbaijan is carried to world markets via a pipeline through Georgia and then the Ceyhan Marine Terminal. BTC, which spans a total of 1,776 kilometers, including 1,076 kilometers in Turkey, has the capacity to transfer 1 million barrels a day and 50 million tons of oil per year.
The first loading of the pipeline was officially opened July 13, 2006 with the participation of Turkey’s former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev and Georgian State Minister Mikheil Saakashvili.
Chevron, Kazakhstan to build pipeline
Chevron will help Kazakhstan’s state oil company build a $1.5 billion pipeline from the nation’s biggest producing field to the Caspian Sea, expanding export routes to world markets that bypass Russia.
The U.S. crude producer, the main shareholder in Kazakh oil venture TengizChevroil, will help construct the link from Yeskene, near Atyrau, to Kuryk, near the Aktau port, Chief Executive Officer David O’Reilly said in a statement posted on President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Web site late Thursday. The pipe will add to Chevron’s export options as it ramps up production in Kazakhstan. The venture plans to boost output almost 60 percent to 540,000 barrels a day by the end of this year, or about 25 million tons a year.
State-run KazMunaiGaz National Co. said in January it would start sending oil across the Caspian Sea to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in 2012. The new link will carry oil from the Kashagan and Tengiz fields to Kuryk for shipment by tanker to Azerbaijan, where the BTC link to Turkey originates.
source: Turkish Daily News
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