ADANA - A senior Azerbaijani state official said on Wednesday that an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey which passed via Georgia linked Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Valeh Haciyev, the first deputy state minister for Azerbaijani people living out of the country, said that Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline bound Turkey and Azerbaijan together with a belt.
"Our commercial cooperation boosts our friendship," Haciyev said during "Azerbaijani Culture Festival" in the southern Turkish province of Adana.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is a crude oil pipeline that covers 1,768 kilometres (1,099 miles) from the Azeri-Chirag-Gunesli oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. It connects Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan; Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia; and Ceyhan, a port on the southern Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It is the second longest oil pipeline in the world after the Druzhba pipeline.
All together, three official inauguration ceremonies were held. On May 25th, 2005, the pipeline was officially inaugurated at the Sangachal terminal by President Ilham Aliyev of the Azerbaijan Republic, President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia and then President Ahmet Sezer of Turkey, joined by President Nursaltan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, as well as United States Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman.
The inauguration of the Georgian section of the pipeline was hosted by President Mikheil Saakashvili at the BTC pumping station near Gardabani on October 12th, 2005. The inauguration ceremony at the Ceyhan terminal was held on July 13th 2006.
Oil that was pumped from the Baku end of the pipeline on May 10th, 2005 reached Ceyhan in May 28th, 2006 after a journey of 1,770 km. The first oil was loaded at the Ceyhan Marine Terminal (Haydar Aliyev Terminal) onto a ship named British Hawthorn. The tanker sailed away from the port on June 4th, 2006 with about 600,000 barrels of crude oil. This marked the start of export of Azerbaijan`s oil via the BTC oil pipeline to world markets.
(BRC-MS)