Page 37 - GEORptAug18

TANAP will flow into the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline that starts in Greece and runs to Italy via Albania and a route under the Adriatic Sea.
Oil and oil-related shipments from Georgia’s Black Sea port of Batumi fell 53.7% y/y between January and April from a year earlier, an official at the KazMunaiGas-operated terminal told Reuters on May 3. The official said some crude oil volumes were rerouted to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium this year, while some fuel oil was sent to the port of Taman in Russia and Georgia’s other Black Sea port of Kulevi. January-April shipments of crude oil and refined oil products from Batumi totalled 415,613 tonnes, down from 898,316 tonnes in the same period last year, said the official, who asked not to be identified. In April alone, overall shipments were 115,086 tonnes, compared with 98,205 tonnes the previous month and 249,735 tonnes in April last year. The news agency said shipments of crude oil and refined oil products from Batumi totalled 2.109mn tonnes in 2017, down from 3.377mn in 2016.
The Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), a natural gas pipeline running from Azerbaijan to Georgia to Turkey to Europe, will go into operation on June 12, Georgia Today reported on May 15. The Minister of Energy and Natural Resources of Turkey, Berat Albayrak, reportedly said gas supplies would subsequently begin on June 30. TANAP, part of the Southern Gas Corridor which is also to be formed by the South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), gives Azerbaijan the opportunity to establish more vital hard currency revenues by exploiting its giant Shah Deniz gas field in the south of the Caspian Sea. The key objective is to sell gas on the Western European market. The TANAP construction project was launched in March 2015. Shah Deniz Stage 2, or Full Field Development (FFD), which TANAP will capitalise on following development work by BP, is a giant project set to add 16bn cubic metres per year (bcma) of gas production to the approximately 10 bcma produced by Shah Deniz Stage 1. The capacity of the TANAP gas pipeline, with a total length of about 1,850 kilometers, will be at least 16bn cm.
9.1.2 Automotive sector news
Tbilisi mayor Kakha Kaladze argued on July 3 that Georgia should introduce a ban on used car imports, calling the situation in the capital “a complete disaster”. Georgia and other countries from the Eastern Europe and Eurasia region are major importers of used cars, most of them from Western Europe. Relatively low incomes and the widespread availability of cheaper used cars means many countries in the region have only a small market for new cars — but the use of older vehicles has negative environmental consequences. Speaking at a conference in the Georgian capital, Kaladze said that the number of imported vehicles is increasing by 7% a year, and that 98% of them are outdated, according to a city hall statement. Overall, 90% of private cars in the country are outdated.
“The first thing to be done alongside with technical inspection is to halt importing old cars ... This might trigger some dissatisfaction, but this is the step that is to be taken. The matter concerns the health of our kids,” the mayor concluded. He now plans to raise the issue of old car imports with Georgia’s central government.
37 GEORGIA Country Report August 2018 www.intellinews.com