ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Oil shipments from Kazakhstan through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will approach 120 million barrels per year, the Kazakh ambassador to Azerbaijan said.
Serik Primbetov, the Kazakh ambassador to Azerbaijan, said the first shipments through the 1,100-mile BTC pipeline would be around 700,000 barrels, the Azeri Press Agency reported Friday.
Most of those shipments, Primbetov said, would come from the Kashagan offshore oil field once operations begin in 2014. Reserves from the Tengiz field in western Kazakhstan may meet BTC capacity in the interim.
Officials with BP-Azerbaijan, the majority shareholder in BTC, said Monday shipments from BTC had arrived in Baku in mid-October, though the volume was not disclosed.
"As we announced two weeks ago, shipment of Tengiz crude through BTC was slated to begin by the end of October, and this is what has occurred," BP said.
The Kazakh shipments represent the first time oil from outside Azerbaijan has been shipped through BTC. Shipments through BTC were disrupted in August following a fire on a Turkish section of the pipeline and during fighting between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia. A gas leak at the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli complex in the Caspian Sea froze some capacity at BTC as well.
