BAKU, Azerbaijan, February 13. The SOCAR trading house - SOCAR Trading may establish oil supplies to the Tajik refinery in FEZ Dangara (Free Economic Zone), but it is rather not about Azerbaijan's oil, but oil from other sources, an informed source told Trend.
"At the end of 2023, after intergovernmental negotiations in Dushanbe, SOCAR Trading started to explore the characteristics of the TK-Oil refinery. Having extensive experience in trading third-country oil, in particular Kazakh, Turkmen, and Russian oil, SOCAR Trading can supply this oil to the Tajik refinery taking into account simple logistics. It is not commercially viable to transport Azeri oil to Tajikistan. The main market for high quality, expensive oil of Azerbaijan is Europe," the source said.
According to him, the volumes of oil for the TC-Oil refinery will be specified.
To note, the refinery on the territory of Tajikistan's FEZ Dangara with a capacity of 1.2 million tons of oil per year was built in 2014-17 by the Chinese company Dong Ying Heli Investment and Development.
According to official statistics, in 2022 oil production in Tajikistan was only about 25,000 tons, and in 2023 it decreased to 18,000 tons.
There are two small oil refineries in Tajikistan with a total design capacity of 150,000 tons per year, but due to the lack of raw materials, their utilization is reduced many times over.
It would be easier for Tajikistan to buy oil from neighboring Iran, but international sanctions against Iran do not allow such transactions.
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