The company currently owns the tankers Aktau, Astana and Almaty, 12,400 DWT each. The small size of the vessels is due to the shallow depths at which the transportation has to be carried out.
Kazakhstan began to look for alternative oil delivery routes to the world market amid problems with crude oil transportation through the pipeline of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). Shipments through the port of Novorossiysk were repeatedly suspended in 2022 because of repairs and decisions of supervisory authorities. At the end of the year the volume of transported oil amounted to 52.2 million tons.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, to which oil has to be delivered across the Caspian Sea, was chosen as the main replacement. As part of the contract with the Azerbaijani SOCAR in 2023, KazMunayGas intends to deliver through it 1.5 million tons of oil from the Tengiz field. In March, 20,000 tons were shipped, in April it will increase to 125,000 tons.
The publication’s sources claim that Kazakhstani authorities still want to increase the route’s capacity to 20 million tons per year, as previously stated. This is hindered by the existing contracts with the CPC, the need for significant investments and the high cost of the alternative.
