MOSCOW, August 12 (RIA Novosti) - Azerbaijan will not give up oil transportation through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline, the head of an Azerbaijani oil major said in Baku Friday.
Azerbaijani news website www.day.az reported SOCAR (State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic) president Natik Aliyev as saying: "we need this pipeline until the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan [BTC] pipeline is put into operation. Even then, it will take a year to establish oil transportation to Turkey."
"The Baku-Novorossiisk [pipeline] is an alternative means of exporting Azerbaijan's hydrocarbons, and there is no need to give it up."
Azerbaijan loses money when pumping its oil through the northern Russian pipeline, as the oil gets mixed with lower-quality hydrocarbons, he said.
"We will be able to reduce oil transportation to Novorossiisk, but we will not give it up completely," he said.
He also said that oil transportation through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline had decreased, as the Azerbaijan International Operational Company had been using the pipeline more this year. Company experts have calculated that the state oil company lost $45 million over the past four months.
The BTC pipeline linking Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey has been called "the project of the century". It was named after former Azerbaijani president Geidar Aliyev, the father of Natik Aliyev, who died in 2003, and is 1,767 kilometers long, with a capacity of 50 million metric tons a year. The project cost is estimated at $3.6 billion. The pipeline will be commissioned around December 2005.
