Baku News

BAKU, September 27 (RIA Novosti) - The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan will start building a $4 billion oil refinery in Turkey in 2008, company president Rovnag Abdullayev said Thursday. The refinery, expected to have capacity of 15 million tons annually and to consist of an oil refining unit and a petrochemicals unit, will be built close to the Ceyhan port on the Mediterranean, to which oil is pumped via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Abdullayev also said the Turkish government had allocated 1,000 hectares of land for the refinery, and that a feasibility study is underway. The 1,700-kilometer (1,000-mile) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, expected to start operating at full export capacity (1 million bbl/d) in 2008, pumps crude from Azerbaijan's oil fields off the Caspian coast via Georgia to Turkey, and onto Western markets.