Ankara, September 4 - Neftegaz.RU. Rosneft will supply oil to SOCAR Turkey Aegean Refinery (STAR) established in İzmir. SOCAR's President Rovnag Abdullayev and Rosneft's CEO Igor Sechin signed the agreement that will bring Russian oil to the SOCAR's refinery, which is expected to become operational in the coming months.
With this contract, 1 million tons of Russian oil per year will be supplied to Turkey's largest foreign investor SOCAR's Star Refinery as of December this year. Meanwhile, STAR started operations at its 1st facility in early August. The 1st crude oil cargo ship, Absheron, carrying 80,000 tons of feedstock from Azerbaijan, arrived at the 2,400-hectare facility on the Aliağa Peninsula.
The $6.3 billion refinery is the largest single-location real sector investment in Turkey's history and will be one of the biggest petroleum and gas operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The refinery is being built by SOCAR, which began investing in Turkey after it acquired the country's leading petrochemical company Petkim in 2008 for $2 billion.
The refinery is expected to cut Turkey's current account deficit by $1.5 billion. It also looks to fully eliminate the need to import jet fuel, which will correspond to 7-8 % of its total production. The refinery is also expected to reduce LPG imports to 70 % from 79 %.
With an annual production capacity of 10 mln tons of crude oil, the refinery will also produce 1.6 mln tons of naphtha, 1.6 mln tons of jet fuel, and 4.5 mln tons of low-sulfur diesel that the Petkim refinery needs will be produced at STAR.
