Oil Shipments From Georgia’s Batumi Port Drop 38 pct in Jan-Feb

Oil and related shipments from Georgia’s Black Sea port of Batumi dropped 38 percent in the first two months of 2019 from a year earlier, an official at a KazMunaiGas-operated terminal at the port said on Friday.

Shipments of crude oil and refined oil products from Batumi have fallen in recent years, partly because Azerbaijan prefers to send its oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline or via its own terminal at the Georgian port of Kulevi, rather than from Batumi, which is operated by a Kazakh company.

There were no shipments of crude oil, jet fuel or vacuum gasoil from Batumi in January or February, the official, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters.

Some crude oil was re-routed to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, the official said, while some fuel oil was sent to the port of Taman in Russia and to Kulevi.

Oil and oil-related shipments from Batumi fell to 125,945 tonnes in January-February, from 202,322 tonnes a year earlier. In February alone shipments were 75,700 tonnes, compared with 93,858 tonnes a year earlier and 50,246 tonnes in January this year.