Ankara and Moscow negotiate on new routes of hydrocarbons supply

As it was previously reported, Turkey and Russia are preparing to conclude an international agreement. Along with traditional offers on nuclear energy and gas, the Turkish side has raised the issue of how to transport liquid hydrocarbons to the Mediterranean Sea bypassing the extremely congested Bosphorus Strait. But instead of failed economic project of Samsun-Ceyhan oil pipeline, proposals to solve this problem through the positive development of existing Russian-Azerbaijani and Turkish-Azerbaijani agreements were made during preliminary consultations on alternative routes for oil. It was a question about the use of the Baku - Tbilisi - Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline.

Russian oil is delivered to Baku through the reverse mode via the already working Baku – Novorossiysk oil pipeline. However, it won’t come into the BTC pipeline, as it is much inferior in quality than the Caspian oil. But Russian Urals can be successfully processed at Baku refineries and the volumes released of Azeri Light will be exported through the Turkish port of Ceyhan. This scheme was suggested by head of the Russian state-owned company Rosneft, Igor Sechin in August of last year. He talked about the economic benefits of such scheme: "If we supply Urals crude to Baku refineries, we will obtain efficiency in transport, the volumes received of Azeri Light from Ceyhan, for example. We will supply it to our Italian processing plants or German ones".