Energy
Batumi Oil Terminal Logs Best Month Since 2017 on Kazakh Oil
September 16, 2026
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Batumi Oil Terminal, the Georgian Black Sea facility owned by Kazakhstan's national pipeline operator KazTransOil, handled 293,000 tonnes of oil, oil products and gas in August 2026, its highest monthly throughput since 2017, the company said in a statement reported by Trend on 15 September.
The record was driven by higher cargo volumes and by the resumption of crude oil and jet fuel handling this year, KazTransOil said, while fuel oil throughput has been gradually declining as Kazakhstan's refineries process crude more deeply.
The eight-month picture
January-August throughput was 1.251 million tonnes, up 37,000 tonnes or 3% year on year. The mix: 178,000 tonnes of crude, 589,000 tonnes of heavy products, 401,000 tonnes of light products and 83,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas. The terminal serves cargo from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and other countries.
A 3% growth rate for the eight months against a record August says the year started slowly and accelerated. Crude handling at Batumi had been dormant, and CBJ reported earlier this year that the terminal resumed Jet A-1 transit after an eight-year break. The August figure is the first evidence that those restarts are producing volume rather than headlines.
Kazakhstan's westward push
Batumi is one leg of a broader Kazakh effort to move more oil west of the Caspian. KazTransOil loaded 2.384 million tonnes into tankers at Aktau in January-August, up 6%, of which transshipment toward the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline rose 12% to 1.034 million tonnes, the company said in a statement carried by Trend on 9 September. Consolidated transportation and transshipment across the group was 31.890 million tonnes, up 4%, and 30.639 million tonnes moved through its 5,196-kilometre main pipeline system.
Kazakhstan has publicly targeted a substantial increase in BTC shipments this year, as CBJ reported in August. The eight-month figure of 1.034 million tonnes implies the full year will land toward the lower end of that ambition unless the fourth quarter is unusually heavy.
Why it matters
Batumi and BTC are alternatives to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium route through Russia, which carries the bulk of Kazakh exports. The volumes moving via Georgia remain a small fraction of Kazakh output, but the direction is consistent: every category KazTransOil reports on the western route grew this year. For Georgia, a terminal that has been under-used for most of a decade is again generating transit fees and port activity in Batumi, alongside the separately reported jet-fuel and petroleum-product flows through the corridor.
Caveats
A single record month is not a trend, and the comparison base of 2017 reflects how far the terminal had fallen rather than how high it has climbed. The heavy-product share of throughput is structurally declining as Kazakh refineries upgrade, so future growth depends on crude and light products replacing it. Caspian tanker capacity, shallow water at Aktau and the price differential between CPC and Trans-Caspian routing all cap how much volume can shift west. Batumi's August is a real improvement; it is not yet a new normal.
