Page 37 - GEORptJun18

Shah Deniz Stage 1.
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 Transport sector news
The strong upward trend in passenger flow through Georgia’s airports continued in the first four months of 2018, with Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili anticipating another record year fuelled by growth in the tourist industry. Passenger numbers grew by 34% in January-April 2018, following 43% growth in 2017, Kvirikashvili pointed out during the opening of a new air traffic control centre on May 18. The data indicates that “record-breaking numbers of passengers should be expected in Georgia's airports” this year, he added. In May alone, five new international routes have been launched to and from the international airport in Kutaisi, Georgia’s third largest city, serving Rome, Paris, Prague, Barcelona, and Athens. Eurocontrol forecasts a 7% increase in aircraft flying to and from Georgia this year, according to data cited by the prime minister, following a 15% hike last year. Kvirikashvili also highlighted Georgia’s attempts to position itself as a transit hub between Europe and Asia. “Georgia is a country capable of connecting Asia and Europe through the shortest air routes, similar to land routes,” he said, according to a government statement . “The shortest air routes will enable airlines to select the shortest distance while planning flights, which means lower operating costs and mitigated negative environmental impact, along with shorter flight durations.”
37 GEORGIA Country Report June 2018 www.intellinews.com