The ceremony is to be attended by President Nursultan Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan), President Mikhail Saakashvili (Georgia), President Ahmet Necdet Sezer (Turkey), US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, special representative of the Russian president for international energy relations Igor Yusupov, board chairman of Neftegaz Ukraine Alexei Ivchenko, and Norwegian Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy Oluf Ulseth.
The heads of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia and Kazakhstan will sign a political declaration in support of the East-West transport corridor.
Festivities will be held in the National Park of Baku on the occasion of the commissioning of the pipe.
It will take 10 million barrels of oil to fill the 1,773km pipe running across Azerbaijan (449km), Georgia (235km) and Turkey (1,059km) to the oil terminal in Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. The oil will come from the Azeri-Chirag-Gyuneshli oilfield in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea.
It may take over six months to gradually fill the pipe, so that the Caspian oil will be loaded to the first tanker in Ceyhan only in the fourth quarter of the year. It has been calculated that oil will reach the territory of Georgia a month after the commissioning in Baku.
Calculations show that the process of filling the pipe with 10 million barrels of oil will cost about $400 million. The overall cost of the project, which was launched in 2001, is $4 billion.
The throughput capacity of the 1,050-mm pipe is 50 million tons of oil a year, or 1 million barrels a day.
The shareholders of the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) consortium are British Petroleum (30.1%), the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (25%), Unocal (8.9%), Statoil (8.71%), TPAO (Turkish Petroleum, 6.53%), Eni (5%), Itochu (3.4%), INPEX (2.5%), ConocoPhillips (2.5%), Total (5%), and Amerada Hess (2.36%).
