AZERBAIJAN - The Crude Oil Exports.

Of the 440,500 b/d crude exports, Azeri Light produced by AIOC accounts for about 390,000 b/d and the rest involves crudes produced by Socar and its JV partners. About 200,000 b/d of the Azeri Light flow through the BTC line, a throughput to double by end-2006, and another 190,000 b/d are pumped through the northern and western routes mentioned above.

The first Azeri Light cargo loaded at Ceyhan on June 4 amounted to around 600,000 barrels taken by a BP tanker, British Hawthorn, and this was part of a volume sold to ExxonMobil. The loading followed completion of the testing, commissioning and filling of the BTC pipeline along its entire 1,768-km route across Azerbaijan (443 km), Georgia (249 km) and Turkey (1,076 km), from the Sangachal terminal on the Caspian coast near Baku. A total of 10m barrels of Azeri Light from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) fields in the Caspian Sea were needed complete the filling of the pipeline.

The BTC Co. shareholders are: BP (30.1%); AzBTC (25%); Chevron (8.9%); Statoil (8.71%); TPAO (6.53%); ENI (5%); Total (5%); Itochu (3.4%); INPEX (2.5%); ConocoPhillips (2.5%) and Amerada Hess (2.36%).

The 1,768-km pipeline will eventually allow 1m b/d of Azeri and Kazakh crude oils to be exported safely from Ceyhan. The pipeline uses 46/42/34-inch pipe. It has eight pump stations and 98 valve stations across the three transit countries. It crosses more than 1,500 rivers and climbs to a high point of 2,700 metres before returning to sea level at Ceyhan. The new terminal has seven crude oil storage tanks, with a capacity of 1m barrels each and a jetty two km long allowing two 300,000-ton tankers to load at the same time.

BTC brings significant benefits to the region. Avoiding the Bosphorus, it helps relieve an inevitable growth in oil-related traffic and associated environmental risks, while creating major revenues for the transit countries, and will help strengthen economic and political links between Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and the West Ceyhan is the end point of a crude oil pipeline running from Iraq.

The Caspian Sea's huge oil and gas reserves are shared by Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. With increased demand for oil and crude prices at more than $70/barrel, any major improvement to supply systems is significant. The Associated Press on June 1 quoted Bulent Aliriza, an analyst with the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), as saying: "When demand is so high, every little bit of incremental [crude] oil is important for the market".

The BTC project, conceived in the mid-1990s and launched in 2002, intended to tie the oil-rich newly independent former Soviet nations to the West and reduce the influence of Russia and Iran. US officials insisted that the pipeline be built through Turkey, bypassing the Middle East and Russia. Today, the pipeline is more a means of diversifying supplies to help lower dependence on any one supplier.

BP has said Azeri Light may sqeeze out light African grades from the Mediterranean market. The pipeline's this year will average almost 300,000 b/d and will reach 1m b/d capacity in 2008.