18-06-08 The 500th tanker of oil has been delivered from the Sangachal terminal near Baku, via the territories of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to Ceyhan port, according to BP-Azerbaijan. The St Elena tanker arrived at Ceyhan on June 14 and was loaded with 630,000 barrels of crude, belonging to SOCAR.
Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil is intended for Trieste (Italy).

Since the beginning of expert operations in 2006, BTC has been operated with good safety indicators. The capacity of the pipeline was constantly raising and the top daily capacity made 949,393 barrels on May 11 of 2008.
Moreover, in May of 2008 another record was set on BTC -- within a month 37 tankers were loaded in Ceyhan and the total volume of export made 29 mm barrels of crude.

Overall volume of oil and condensate, so far exported by BTC, nears 397 mm barrels (over 53 mm tons). Currently, the volume of production, exported by BTC, has neared 850,000 bpd and the pipeline is expected to transport 1 mm bpd (nearly 50 mm tpy) later thisyear.
Currently, work is carried out at raising the pipeline capacity by 20 %, which allows bringing it to 1,200 bpd.

The increase in the pipeline's capacity to complete by December of this year will expand the capacities of export of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli and Shah Deniz hydrocarbons in the near future and ensure additional capacities in the long term perspective.
BTC shareholders are: BP (30,1 %, operator); AzBTC (25,00 %); Chevron (8,90 %); StatoilHydro (8,71 %); TPAO (6,53 %); ENI (5,00 %); Total (5,00 %), Itochu (3,40 %); Inpex (2,50 %), ConocoPhillips (2,50 %), and Hess (2,36 %).