BAKU
Azerbaijan reduced the transit of third-party oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in the first half of this year, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on demand and production.
The quantity of oil shipped through Azerbaijan, Georgia and on to Turkey and further into the Mediterranean market declined to 1.7 million tonnes in January to June this year, from 2 million tonnes in the same period in 2020, sources at Azerbaijan’s state energy firm SOCAR told the Tribune.
“Such fluctuations in the transit of third-party oil through BTC are quite acceptable and correspond to fluctuations on the world oil market,” one of the SOCAR sources said.
Azerbaijan transits oil from Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, which deliver oil to Baku by tankers through the Caspian Sea and further along the BTC.
Transit volumes don’t include oil produced in Azerbaijan.
Oil export figures through the BTC from Azerbaijan in the first half of 2021 have not been published yet, but the oil-rich country has reduced the amount of oil it shipped to Turkey through this major pipeline in the first five months of this year due to shrinking resources in the main Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oilfields and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The quantity of oil shipped through Georgia to Turkey declined to 11.125 million tonnes from January to May this year, 11.2 percent down from the same period last year.
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 that took hold last year, impacting mobility and production across the world, have significantly affected global demand for oil, eventually forcing oil producers to cut their production levels. BP said in May that oil output at its projects in Azerbaijan declined to 484,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the first quarter of 2021 from 524,000 bpd a year earlier.
Azerbaijan also exports oil via Georgia by rail and through the Baku-Supsa pipeline, as well as 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.
Meanwhile, oil shipments from Azerbaijan to Russia are rising this year after being interrupted due to pipeline maintenance in 2020. Azerbaijan shipped 498,550 tonnes of oil via Russia in January-June, increasing 16.9 times compared with the first half of 2020.
In June this year, oil shipments totalled 84,900 tonnes, it said.
SOCAR stopped supplies to Russia’s Black Sea’s port of Novorossiisk in March 2019, citing planned maintenance on the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline. The company diverted crude flows to its own Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline after the suspension of transit via Russia. Shipments resumed on July 15 last year and the total transit of oil from Azerbaijan via Russia amounted to 613,029 tonnes in 2020.
Shipments were suspended again in January 2021, but SOCAR this year signed a contract with Russian oil pipeline operator Transneft to transport more than one million tonnes of oil through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline.
SOCAR said in March it planned to boost its oil transit via Russia by 1.8 times year-on-year in 2021. The rise in shipments this year is explained by the absence of supplies in the first six months of 2020. In 2020, SOCAR exported 613,290 tonnes of oil via the Baku-Novorossiisk oil pipeline.
Azerbaijan pumps oil through a 1,330-km pipeline from the capital Baku to Novorossiisk, a port on Russia’s Black Sea coast. The oil-rich country has used this pipeline since 1997.