Khassenov: Volumes of Kazakh oil transit via BTC to grow

The volume of Kazakh oil transit through Azerbaijan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is growing annually and will continue to grow in the future, Chairman of the Board of the national company KazMunayGas (KMG) Askhat Khassenov said, Report informs.

“Transportation [of Kazakh oil via BTC] is gradually increasing from year to year,” he noted.

According to Khassenov, any further increase in the export of Kazakh oil via Azerbaijan is always a subject of commercial negotiations.

“There are questions [concerning] commercial conditions, i.e. how much transportation costs. The better the conditions, the more oil will be transported. There are [also] restrictions on the quality bank, and they also need to be addressed. That is, there are technical issues, and commercial ones. At the same time, one conclusion is that volumes are growing and will continue to grow from year to year,” Khasenov noted.

In 2022, KMG and SOCAR signed a general agreement on the transit of Kazakh oil. In March 2023, a test shipment of 7,000 tons of oil from the Kashagan field was carried out through Azerbaijan.

In March 2024, KMG and SOCAR signed an agreement on a phased increase in oil transit through the territory of Azerbaijan. According to the document, the volume of supplies is planned to increase to 2.2 million tons per year. In addition, on January 15, 2025, SOCAR Midstream Operations LLC signed an agreement for the transit of 240,000 tons of Kashagan oil per year with KMG Trading, a subsidiary of KazMunayGas (KMG).

The first batch of Kashagan oil, about 6,000 tons, loaded onto a tanker in the port of Aktau on January 25, arrived at the Sangachal terminal on January 27. In 2023, more than 1 million tons of Kazakh oil were sent from the port of Aktau to the BTC system. In 2024, the transit of Kazakh oil via BTC amounted to 1.4 million tons. The plan for 2025 via BTC is 1.7 million tons. The total volume of Kazakh oil transit through Azerbaijan reached 3 million tons.