Poor BTC. It’s my favorite pipeline (Is it weird to have a favorite pipeline? Yeah, I guess it is). The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has claimed responsibility, but whether this explosion was due to a terrorist attack has yet to be verified.
An explosion on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline on Tuesday night in eastern Turkey has halted the oil flow along the one million barrels per day pipeline, a senior Turkish Energy Ministry official said.
“The fire is under control, but we need 24 hours from now to extinguish it. After the fire is put out, we can look at the damage and say when it will be possible to reopen the line,” the source said speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokeswoman for British Petroleum, a shareholder in the pipeline, said oil flows were halted after a fire damaged a valve on a section in eastern Turkey, but exports from the Ceyhan port terminal continued from storage.
[...]
The pipeline, one of the world’s biggest, pumps over one million barrels per day from fields in the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea to the Turkish Mediterranean coast, covering over one percent of global oil supply.
The BTC is an alternative to the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline that takes Azeri oil to Russia, from where it is sold on to Europe.The cause of the explosion was not immediately known.
“Whether it is sabotage or some other reason, we still don’t have that information. At this point all our efforts have been focused on putting out the fire completely,” said the Energy Ministry official.
Related posts:
- BTC Pipeline opens From the BBC: Oil is set to flow from the Caspian Sea direct to the Mediterranean for the first time after a $3.6bn (�2bn) pipeline opened on Wednesday. Starting in Azerbaijan, the 1,600km (1,000 mile) pipeline will pass through Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The project has taken...
- BP’s “neighborhood watch” program for the BTC pipeline You don’t hear much about the BTC pipeline these days (which, on second thought, is probably a good thing considering most pipeline news from the former Soviet republics often involves explosions, gas shutoffs, and various other negative incidents), so I was surprised to find this rather positive article in today’s...
- Russian bombing raid near the BTC Pipeline Over the past week, Georgian officials have made several claims that the Russians were bombing an area through which the BTC and South Caucasus Pipelines run. An article in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal seems to confirm these claims: A neat row of large craters in a field...
