Rovnag Abdullayev, President of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), said that the company was planning reverse oil pumping through the Baku-Novorossiysk Pipeline (Russia will pump Urals oil to Azerbaijan) and was considering partial transportation of Russian oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline for European refineries involving Rosneft.
Part of oil will be transferred for refineries of Azerbaijan. The operations will be evaluated this year and realized in 2014.
Seymur Aliyev, head of the Russian section of the Trend news agency, said that Azerbaijan was technically prepared for the projects. He said that there were no problems in transporting Russian oil through Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan. The pipeline has a capacity of 1.2 million barrels a day and transports only 700,000-800,000 barrels at the moment.
The BTC Pipeline was built with prospects to transport Kazakh oil. It may transport oil directly to the Mediterranean Sea, bypassing the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
Regarding the Baku-Novorossiysk Pipeline, the issue will be discussed by Russia’s Rosneft and Transneft.
Azerbaijan will not lose anything if its Azeri Light oil will be replaced by Russia’s Urals. 8 million tons of Turkmen oil are pumped through the BTC every year.
Liyev said that Azerbaijani refineries had a capacity of about 15 million tons a year (nominal capacity 20 million tons a year). The refineries process 6-7 million tons of Azerbaijani oil. The oil processing level exceeds 90% in Azerbaijan.
The expert reminded that Azerbaijan will build and launch a new refinery in 2017-2018 and fully launch it in 2020.
