Azernews.Az

By Aynur Jafarova

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Company (BTC Co.), operated by British BP, has loaded the 2500th tanker with BTC oil.

The Vinga tanker arrived at the Ceyhan Marine Terminal on 15 April and departed for Spain on April 21 upon completion of the loading.

The tanker took on board approximately 735,000 barrels of oil transported from the Sangachal terminal near Baku across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Ceyhan Terminal.

Craig Wiggs, BP's Vice-President for Midstream, believes the lifting of the 2500th tanker from Ceyhan is a remarkable milestone achieved by this world-class facility.

"BTC has implemented major sustainable development initiatives across the three countries [Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey] to build skills and capabilities in local communities, improve their access to social infrastructure and help them to generate sustainable livelihoods," he said.

The 1,768-km BTC pipeline became operational in June 2006. Since that time BTC has carried a total of over 1.9 billion barrels of crude oil and sent to world markets. BTC's throughput capacity is currently 1.2 million barrels per day.

In 2013, BTC exported about 247.2 million barrels of crude oil loaded on 329 tankers at Ceyhan.

The oil transported via BTC to world markets mainly comes from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) and Shah Deniz fields in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea. Also, crude oil from Turkmenistan continues to be transported via BTC. Since October 2013, transportation of some volumes of Tengiz crude oil through the BTC pipeline was resumed.

The BTC Co. shareholders are BP (30.1 percent); AzBTC (25 percent); Chevron (8.9 percent); Statoil (8.71 percent); TPAO (6.53 percent); ENI (5 percent); Total (5 percent), ITOCHU (3.4 percent); INPEX (2.5 percent), ConocoPhillips (2.5 percent) and ONGC (BTC) Limited (2.36 percent).