Kazakhstan eyes Middle Corridor for oil exports as route capacity reaches 5M tonnes

Kazakhstan views the Middle Corridor as an increasingly important alternative for its crude exports, a senior executive at the country's national oil company said — even as infrastructure limits and higher costs keep the route a hedge rather than a highway for now.

Speaking at the 2nd Caspian and Central Asia Oil Trading and Logistics Forum in Baku, Kuanysh Keskinbayev, commercial director at KMG Kashagan, noted the trans-Caspian route can currently carry up to 5 million tonnes of oil per year — modest beside the roughly 80 percent of Kazakh crude that flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) across Russian territory to Novorossiysk.

The calculus is strategic. The corridor — tankering crude across the Caspian to Baku and onward via the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline — "remains one of the few routes operating without major disruptions," Keskinbayev said, at a time when the Druzhba pipeline faces political constraints and CPC exposure concentrates risk on a single corridor. Higher transport costs are partially offset by the premium pricing Azerbaijani-blend barrels command at Ceyhan.

For Azerbaijan and Georgia, every incremental Kazakh barrel routed south-west deepens their transit economies — and dovetails with the corridor's freight boom, from Baku Port's 15 percent container growth to new joint shipping ventures on the Caspian.

Source: Report, from the Caspian and Central Asia Oil Trading and Logistics Forum, Baku.