Azernews.Az

Kazakhstan plans to export its oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) main export pipeline hosted by Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey by 2012, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has said.
"After the seaports under construction on the Caspian Sea coasts are commissioned, Kazakh oil will be transported via BTC," he told a joint news conference with visiting Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul last week. "Kazakhstan intends to become one of the first five oil exporters by 2012."
President Gul said 250 million barrels of Azerbaijan's oil have been transported through the main export pipeline in the past year. He said Ankara welcomed the signing of an agreement on the transportation of Kazakh oil through the conduit between Baku and Astana earlier this year.
"This will be an important factor in the region's economic development," the Turkish leader added.
The BP-operated BTC pipeline opened in July 2006. The oil pumped into the 1768-km conduit is produced from the major Azeri-Chirag-Gunashi (ACG) fields in the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea. Its throughput capacity is one million barrels per day, or 50 million tons a year. ACG output is on target to reach the volume as early as in 2009. Baku says that should Kazakhstan begin exporting its oil via the pipe, its capacity could be further increased by 10 million tons.
Nazarbayev said earlier this month that the Central Asian state relied on exports through Russian territory but saw BTC exports as an alternative for transporting its hydrocarbons "without which the BTC project would be ineffective".