Azerbaijan to raise oil shipments via Russia

Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR plans to increase its shipments via Russia to 1.5 million tonnes in 2017 from 1.21 million tonnes last year, a source at SOCAR said on Monday. "SOCAR has signed a contract with Russian company Transneft on shipments of 1.5 million tonnes of oil via the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline in 2017, 325,000 tonnes of which will be shipped in the first three months of this year," the source, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters.
SOCAR shipped 1.21 million tonnes of oil via Russia last year, down 4.8 percent from the 1.27 million tonnes shipped in 2015. The decline was due to SOCAR being unable to export via the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline for the first two months of the year. It resumed exports via the pipeline on March 1 after signing an agreement in late February with Russian pipeline monopoly AK Transneft which ended a three-month gap while they negotiated a new deal. Azerbaijan ships only a very small proportion of its oil exports via Russia, using routes through Georgia and Turkey for the bulk of its crude shipments. SOCAR's crude has a lower sulphur content than Russia's Urals blend.