BTC Co. board of directors discusses construction progress

A meeting of the board of directors of BTC Co. pipeline construction company (operator of BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline construction and operations), will take place today, 15 December, in London, at which the progress achieved in the implementation of this project will be discussed, BP-Azerbaijan (project operator) press service has advised KZ-today.

At the same time Natik Aliyev, president of SOCAR, has stated that during that meeting it is planned to discuss the results of the BTC project implementation in 2004 and to approve the working budget for the next year.

Currently the BTC construction is at the concluding stage. The Azerbaijani part of the pipeline will be ready for the commissioning in the late January, 2005, the Georgian part - in March, the Turkish part - in the late March.

The length of BTC pipeline is 1,767 km, of which - 443 km are in Azerbaijan, in Georgia - 248 km, in Turkey - 1076 km. The pipeline capacity is 50 million tons of oil per annum. The construction works started in April 2003.

The total cost of the project is $3.6 billion, of which $1 billion is invested by the project shareholders and $2.6 billion are attracted loans. Moreover the construction costs are $2.95 billion. The project value is formed also by costs for a purchase of 10 million barrels of oil to fill the pipe, costs for negotiations on financing and the debt servicing. At the same time more than $3 billion have been spent for the BTC project and, according to forecasts it can become 5-7% more expensive.

The participants of BTC project are the following: BP (30.1 %); SOCAR (25.00 %); Unocal (8.90 %); Statoil (8.71 %); TPAO (6.53 %); ENI (5.00 %); Itochu (3.40 %); ConocoPhillips (2.50 %); INPEX (2.50 %), Total (5.00 %), and Amerada Hess (2.36 %).