Pipeliners

03 April 2007 - Upstream onLine - The Chevron-led TengizChevroil project in Kazakhstan has delayed first oil shipments via the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline by at least six months to early 2008, an Azeri official operating the pipeline said today. "Exports of crude from TengizChevroil can start no earlier than January 2008 as many issues are yet to be cleared by the venture participants," said Ilham Nasirov, Azerbaijan's representative in Baku-Ceyhan. He gave no further details. TengizChevroil, which also includes US supermajor ExxonMobil, Kazakh state oil company KazMunaiGas, a venture of UK supermajor BP and Russia's Lukoil, was not immediately available for comment. The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is run by BP and pumps crude from large Azeri fields on the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The pipeline can pump more than 1 million barrels per day. It currently has excess capacity and is looking for extra volumes of crude. Tengiz shipped about 45 million barrels of crude by tankers via the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan to world markets in the late 1990s. But it has re-routed all volumes to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiisk after building a pipeline via Russia as part of a group known as the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). CPC wants to double capacity to accommodate rising output in Kazakhstan, but Moscow has been blocking the plan for years, asking the pipeline group to raise payment to the Russian government. Tengiz badly needs extra pipeline capacity as it wants to increase production to more than 500,000 bpd this year. Nasirov said Tengiz would pump about 26 million barrels via the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline at the first stage, gradually rising to about 37 million barrels a year, or about 100,000 barrels per day. The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is currently pumping up to 700,000 bpd. Nasirov said Azeri Caspian Sea oilfields would produce over 1.2 million bpd by 2010 and the pipeline would need to install new pumping stations and use chemical additives. The head of Azeri state oil company Socar, Rovnag Abdullayev, told reporters the pipeline might need to expand to up to 1.6 million bpd sometime next decade to ship large volumes of crude from both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.