Kazakhstan’s Kashagan oil heads west to Turkey’s Ceyhan port

The first batch of approximately 6,000 tons of oil from Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field has been delivered to Baku and entered the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, according to Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR.

SOCAR reported that this shipment of Kazakh oil was loaded onto the «Taraz» tanker, owned by Kazakhstan’s national maritime carrier Kazmortransflot (KMTF), at the port of Aktau on Jan. 25. The tanker arrived at the Baku terminal on Jan. 27. According to KMTF, «Taraz» has a deadweight capacity (the total weight including cargo, fuel and water reserves) of 6,980 tons.

KMG Kashagan B.V., a subsidiary of Kazakhstan’s national oil and gas company KazMunayGas (KMG), was the oil exporter. The company holds a 16.88% stake in the North Caspian Project under the North Caspian Production Sharing Agreement (NCPSA) and independently transports and sells its share of production from Kashagan under the terms of the agreement.

In early 2024, SOCAR and KMG signed an agreement to gradually increase oil transit through Azerbaijan to 2.2 million tons per year. The initial agreement, signed in late 2022, had outlined deliveries of 1.5 million tons annually via this route. In January 2025, SOCAR Midstream Operations LLC, a SOCAR subsidiary, and KMG Trading, a subsidiary of KMG, agreed to an annual transit of 240,000 tons of Kashagan oil through Baku.

At the end of 2024, Akhmad Mustafin, executive director for commerce at the port of Aktau, told Kursiv.media that the port could increase oil transshipment to 20 million tons in the coming years by constructing offshore mooring terminals (OMTs) similar to those in Russia’s Novorossiysk. The port’s current annual oil transshipment capacity is 7.5 million tons.

According to Mustafin, using OMTs would eliminate the need for dredging since they would be located farther from the port in the Caspian Sea. Additionally, the cost for Kazakh oil tankers calling at Aktau would be lower than current rates.

Mustafin also confirmed that Azerbaijan is willing to accept no more than 2.2 million tons of Kazakh oil annually for transit through the BTC pipeline, which runs through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The limitation exists because the BTC pipeline primarily carries Azerbaijani light oil. If Kazakhstan were to transport more than 2.2 million tons through the pipeline, the resulting blend would be of lower quality, potentially reducing Azerbaijan’s revenue from its oil exports.

In late November 2024, during a government session in the Mazhilis, the lower house of Kazakhstan’s parliament, Energy Minister Almassadam Satkaliyev announced that Kazakhstan planned to ship 1.5 million tons of oil via the BTC pipeline in 2024. However, the country aims to gradually increase deliveries along this route to 20 million tons annually. Satkaliyev also noted that exporting Kazakh oil through Aktau and onward to Baku, bypassing Russia, is more expensive than using the traditional route through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which currently handles about 80% of Kazakhstan’s total oil exports.