BAKU

Azerbaijan reduced the amount of oil it shipped to Turkey through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline in the first nine months of this year due to shrinking resources in the main Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oilfields and the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on demand and production.

The quantity of oil shipped through Georgia to Turkey declined to 148.9 million barrels from January to September this year, down from 163 million barrels in the same period last year, Botas, Turkey’s petroleum pipeline corporation, said.

Most of Azerbaijan’s oil is produced at the giant off-shore ACG oilfields, through a BP-led consortium in which Azerbaijan’s state energy firm SOCAR is a shareholder. ACG has been under development since 1997.

Measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic which took hold last year, impacting mobility and production across the world, have significantly affected global demand for oil, forcing oil producers to eventually cut their production levels.

Azerbaijan reduced total oil exports by 9.5 percent year-on-year to 18.771 million tonnes in January-August. The total value of oil exported during the first eight months of this year amounted to $8.499 billion, 25.1 percent more than in the same period last year. The share of oil in the total export structure in January-August amounted to 65.7 percent.

Azerbaijan exports oil via the BTC pipeline as well as via Georgia by rail, through the Baku-Supsa pipeline and via Russia through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline. Azerbaijan has pumped oil through the 1,330-km pipeline from the capital Baku to Novorossiisk, a port on Russia’s Black Sea coast, since 1997.

Azerbaijan uses the BTC pipeline to export its own oil as well as to transit oil from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

The country sees shipments of transit oil from Kazakhstan through the BTC at 100,000 tonnes in 2021, slightly down from 106,000 tonnes shipped in 2020, a source at Azerbaijan’s state energy firm SOCAR told the Tribune last month.