Over 36m tons of Azeri oil pumped

Tuesday, 12 January 2010 07:09

36.2 million tons of Azerbaijan’s oil were transported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) main export pipeline in 2009, with 2.8m tons pumped in December alone, according to the state oil company SOCAR.
A total of 106.5m tons of crude have been pumped into the conduit as of January 1, 2010.
The volume of Azerbaijani oil exported to world markets from the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in 2009 amounted to 36.3m tons, SOCAR said. As of January 1, 104.7m tons of crude had been exported from Ceyhan.
Additionally, the pipeline transported 1.9m tons of Kazakhstan’s oil last year. A total of 2.2m tons of the Central Asian state’s crude have been pumped through the BTC to date.
The BTC pipeline was opened in July 2006. The 1768km conduit transports oil produced from Azerbaijan’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) oil block in the Caspian Sea. The pipeline, operated by the international consortium, BTC Co, allows over one million barrels of oil a day to be exported from the Caspian without increasing tanker traffic through the crowded Turkish Straits