Oil Shipments from Georgia's Batumi Port Down by 34%
Oil and related shipments from Georgia's Black Sea port of Batumi are down by 33.9 percent in the first eight 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 totalled 1.472 million tonnes, down from 2.227 million tonnes in the same period last year, the official said.
The terminal shipped 3.377 million tonnes of oil and oil products last year, down from 3.616 million tonnes in 2015.
Shipments in August fell to 145,288 tonnes, down from 253,447 tonnes in the same month last year and below the 189,274 tonnes shipped in July, 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
