BP says BTC pipeline reasonable source of income for Turkey
By Aynur Jafarova
The world-class Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline is a reasonable source of income for Turkey as well as a very prestigious project, BP Vice President on Turkey Hakan Turker said, Trend news agency reported on June 10 with reference to Anadolu.
According to Turker, the BTC pipeline is a very important project for Turkey.
He went on to say that one percent of the world's oil passes through the BTC pipeline on a daily basis. According to Turker, BTC crosses 330 settlements in Turkey.
The total length of the BТС pipeline, which carries crude oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli oil fields in the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean coast, is 1,768 kilometers, including the 443 kilometer section running via Azerbaijan, the 249 kilometer section via Georgia and 1,076 kilometers via Turkey.
Construction of the pipeline began in April 2003 and it was filled with oil on May 18, 2005.
The design capacity of BTC is up to one million barrels per day.
The shareholders of BTC are BP (operator - 30.1 percent), AzBTC (25 percent), Chevron (8.90 percent), Statoil (8.71 percent), TPAO (6.53 percent), Eni (5 percent), Total (5 percent), Itochu (3.40 percent), Inpex (2.50 percent), ConocoPhillips (2.50 percent) and Hess (2.36 percent).
According to BP's report on the results of operations in the first quarter of 2013, since June 2006, the BTC pipeline transported 220 million tons of oil. Some 2,140 tankers shipped from the port of Ceyhan were loaded. In Q1, the pipeline exported 7.9 million tons (59.6 million barrels) of oil, which was loaded into 79 tankers.