NEKA, April 29: Iranian President Mohammad Khatami criticized on Thursday US backing of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, a project to export crude from the landlocked Caspian Sea
, as he officially inaugurated an oil terminal here that Iran says will provide supplies more cheaply.
He repeated claims there was no need for the multi-billion-dollar project, which will bypass both Iran and Russia. He implied that Washington, keen to develop the Caspian as an alternative to the Middle East as a source of energy supplies, wanted to put the two countries at a disadvantage.
"The Iranian route to transport Caspian oil is the shortest and the least expensive ... The United States, with its restrictive policy, is posing problems to other countries," Khatami told reporters.
The BTC pipeline, due to start operating in the first quarter of next year, will pump up to one million barrels a day (bpd) of oil from near Azerbaijan's capital Baku, through Georgia and Turkey, to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
It is being built by a consortium of oil majors, led by BP, at a cost of around three billion dollars. More than half of the work has already been completed and the BTC consortium says the pipeline is on schedule.
Russia is also cool toward the pipeline. It favours exporting oil from the Caspian Sea - home of some of the world's biggest untapped hydrocarbon reserves - across its own territory.
In a related development, Iran inaugurated on Thursday a swap agreement with several Caspian oil producers launched several months ago. National Iranian Oil Co. managing director Reza Kasaiezadeh said here that the country was already importing 125,000 bpd from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia via the Neka terminal to be refined in Tehran.
Under the deal, Caspian region crude producers deliver oil to one of Iran's northern ports, and pick up equal amounts of Iranian crude from a port on the Persian Gulf. A pipeline between Neka and Tehran transports the Caspian oil to the refinery in the capital.
Kasaiezadeh said it would cost about two dollars per barrel to transport the oil using this method. He said 80,000 barrels would come from Russia, most of the rest from Kazakhstan, and a small portion from Turkmenistan. The official recently said some 370,000 thousand barrels were expected to be transported per day through the swap until the second half of 2005, but that capacity would was more than 500,000 barrels. -AFP
