Oil shipments from Georgia's Batumi port down by 37% this year
TBILISI (Reuters) — Oil and related shipments from Georgia’s Black Sea port of Batumi are down by 36.6 percent in the first nine months of 2017, a senior official at the terminal, operated by Kazakh state firm KazMunaiGas, said on Friday.
The official gave no reason for the fall, but KazMunaiGas has rerouted some shipments to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline this year.
Shipments of crude oil and refined oil products from Batumi totaled 1.599 MMt in January-September, down from 2.520 MMt in the same period last year, the official said.
The terminal shipped 3.377 MMt of oil and oil products last year, down from 3.616 million tonnes in 2015.
Shipments in September fell to 126,748 t, down from 292,630 t in the same month last year and below the 145,288 t shipped in August, said the official, who asked not to be identified.
Crude and refined oil products from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are shipped out of Georgia’s Black Sea ports of Batumi, Supsa, Poti and a terminal in Kulevi.
Some products are transported across the Caspian Sea in small tankers, unloaded in the Azeri port of Baku and then sent by rail to Georgian ports for export to the Mediterranean.
Reporting by Margarita Antidze; editing by Jason Neely
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