A Critical New Pipeline helps Fuel an Economy

摘要

Already one of the world's fastest growing economies, Azerbaijan is about to reap a windfall in revenues when the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline starts dispensing oil into tankers by the end of the year. The 1,1770-kilometer pipeline will carry one million barrels of oil a day - equivalent to about 1 percent of the world's supply — from the Caspian Sea to the eastern Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey, bypassing the sensitive and heavily used Bosphorus Straits. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP which leads the Caspian exploration project and operates the pipeline, spoke at the inauguration in May. He told the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Kazakhstan that the project was "an heroic engineering achievement, as ground-breaking in today's context as Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaskan pipeline."