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What
are BP’s plans?
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BP's Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey
pipelines system is a vast
social and industrial structure, a gathering of men, women
and machines stretching 1,750 kilometres (1,087 miles) across
hills and valleys, mountains and plains, fields and deserts,
gardens and rivers. A complete system, running from the Azerbaijani
oil and gas fields offshore in the Caspian Sea to a tanker
terminal on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.
The largest part of the system
is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline,
which will carry 1 million barrels of oil per day, from the
Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli offshore oilfields, to a tanker terminal
at Yumurtalik, just south of Ceyhan in Turkey. From there,
the oil would be loaded onto three supertankers per day, which
will carry it to Western Europe and the USA.
BP started
construction in May 2003 and secured
financing, including from public (taxpayers') money in February 2004. Construction of the main pipeline is expected to finish in the second half of 2005; however work will continue on pumping stations and ancillary oil pipelines until at least 2008.
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Scar
left by the East Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline, built in
2000 by Botas.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
is being built along the same route.
[Greg Muttitt / PLATFORM]
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Caspian oil
development (including BTC pipeline) official website: www.caspiandevelopmentandexport.com
Also being developed is a gas pipeline, which will run alongside the BTC pipeline
for much of its length, called the South Caucasus Pipeline
(SCP) (also known as the Shah Deniz pipeline, or the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum
pipeline). This will carry at least 20 million cubic metres of
natural gas per day, from the Shah Deniz offshore gasfield, to enter
the Turkish gas distribution system at Erzurum.
BP wants to
build the SCP line after it has finished building BTC, and to complete
it in 2006.
Both pipelines
will come ashore from the Caspian at the Sangachal terminal, just
south of Baku, which is currently used for the existing smaller
‘Early Oil’ pipelines from Baku to Novorossiysk and from Baku to
Supsa
The pipelines
system will remain in place for at least 40 years. A system through
which will flow US$ 21 million worth of fuel every day, nearly
$8 billion a year, or more than $230 billion in the system’s lifetime.
Map
of the project JPG
format 336K
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