Baku: To date, BTC has carried a total of more than 4.7 billion barrels (about 630 million tonnes) of crude oil loaded on 6,271 tankers and sent to world markets, bp told APA-Economics.

According to Azeri-Press News Agency, the BTC pipeline currently carries mainly ACG crude oil and Shah Deniz condensate from Azerbaijan. In addition, other volumes of Caspian regional crude oil and condensate from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and other SOCAR volumes produced in Azerbaijan continue to be transported via BTC.

The 1,768 km long BTC was designed to export crude oil safely and responsibly from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. Starting from the construction phase, BTC has made a positive difference by bringing significant benefits to the region.

BTC creates substantial revenues for the transit countries and continues to help strengthen economic and political links between Azerbaijan, Georgia, Trkiye, and the West. Since the start of the pipeline project, BTC Co. has worked with more than 550 communities (more than 750,000 people) along the length of the pipeline and has implemented thousands of social initiatives, which will continue in the future.

The current throughput capacity of BTC is 1 million barrels of oil per day. The pipeline uses 46/42/34' diameter pipe and has eight pump stations and 98 valve stations across the three transit countries. The pipeline crosses several mountain ranges, climbing to a high point of 2,830 metres before returning to sea level at Ceyhan, and traverses 3,000 roads, railways, and utility lines, both overground and underground, and more than 1,500 watercourses up to 500 metres wide in the case of the Ceyhan River in Trkiye.

Considered one of the biggest and most complex engineering endeavours of its time, BTC's construction took four years to complete. It was sanctioned in July 2002 and completed in May 2006. The construction activities involved 22,000 people at the peak, with almost 80% being national employees, more than 110 million man-hours spent, and 220,000 joints of pipe welded together.

The first tanker with BTC oil was lifted from Ceyhan on 4 June 2006, when the first cargo of about 600,000 barrels of Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli crude was loaded onto the British Hawthorn and sailed away from the new Ceyhan Marine Terminal.