BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 25. This week, State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) has announced the start of the transit of Kazakh oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
The first shipment of Kazakh oil from the Tengiz field arrived at the Sangachal Terminal in Azerbaijan from the port of Aktau via the "President Heydar Aliyev" tanker on March 23. The transportation of Kazakh oil through BTC is being carried out under a Master Agreement between SOCAR and KazMunayGas, which aims to transit 1.5 million tons of oil annually.
Meanwhile, the Slovnaft refinery owned by Hungarian MOL Group in Bratislava, Slovakia, has announced that it will start processing Azerbaijani oil in April. The 90,000 tons of seaborne crude from Azerbaijan’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli block was transported from the Sangachal oil terminal near Baku to Ceyhan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The shipment has arrived in Croatia and is being delivered to the Slovnaft refinery via the Adria pipeline.
Also, Norway’s Equinor company has revealed its production data from Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block. Thus, the production stood at 30,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (mboe/d) in 2022.
According to the data published by Eurostat this week, Greece paid a total of 1 962 325 800 euros for purchase of Azerbaijani gas as of 2022. In total, Greece imported 1 710 615 989 cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan last year.
Bulgaria, in turn, paid a total of 383 011 600 euros for natural gas imports from Azerbaijan in 2022.
The volume of gas exports from Azerbaijan to Bulgaria stood at 583 566 643 cubic meters. Bulgaria started importing gas from Azerbaijan via the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) which was put into operation on October 1, 2022. The contracted volume of gas supplies via this interconnector is 1 billion cubic meters per year. The total capacity of IGB is 3 billion cubic meters, expandable to 5 billion cubic meters per year.
Moreover, it was announced that oil transportation via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) to Türkiye stood at 35.048 million barrels from January through February 2023, compared to 32.562 million barrels in the same period in 2022. As such, oil supplies to Türkiye via BTC rose by 7.6 percent year-on-year.
At the same time, according to the data from the State Customs Committee published this week, Azerbaijan’s total crude oil and oil products’ exports exceeded 5.175 million tons worth almost $3.251 billion from January to February 2023.
As such, Azerbaijan’s revenues from crude oil and petroleum products’ exports grew by 13.8 percent year-on-year.
Crude oil and petroleum products accounted for 71.91 percent of Azerbaijan’s total exports in the first two months of 2023, as compared to 49.33 percent in the same period in 2022.
In terms of import volume, Italy came in first with 1.8 million tons worth $1.157 billion, followed by Israel with 528,972 tons worth $331.537 million and Spain with 425,844 tons worth $273.803 million.