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Ankara/Baku: The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, which is still ablaze after an explosion, may not reopen for another one to two weeks, a senior source at Turkey's state-owned pipeline company Botas told Reuters on Thursday.
Stocks at the Ceyhan depot, which had been used to keep the one million barrels per day (bpd) pipeline flowing have run dry, the source said, following the explosion on Tuesday night.
"The stocks of crude oil from the BTC pipeline stored in Ceyhan have been exhausted," the Botas source said.
Opened in 2006, the pipeline is the first to carry large volumes of Caspian crude without going through Russia.
The Botas source, who declined to be named, said the fire could take two more days to put out, while the repair of the pipeline would take one to two weeks. The Ceyhan depot has capacity of seven million barrels. Trade sources said loadings of Azeri crude at Ceyhan had now been halted.
"There is no loading," a shipping agent said.
Attack
Kurdish separatists claimed responsibility for the blast which caused the blaze and helped to push oil prices higher.
London Brent crude rose by around $1 yesterday on supply concerns in Turkey, Nigeria and Iran.
The $4 billion BTC pipe-line pumps the equivalent of more than one per cent of world supply from fields in the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.
"The fire will continue longer than [previously] anticipated," the Botas source said.
"The method for fighting the fire is being discussed with the BTC management. Depending on the method used, the opening of the line may take one or two weeks," he added, without providing more details.
The separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla group claimed responsibility for the explosion on the pipeline in a statement on its website.
Big blow
The PKK, which usually attacks military targets in southeastern Turkey, previously said it was behind a blast on an Iranian-Turkish natural gas pipeline in March.
The attack halted gas exports from Iran to Turkey for five days.
BP owns 30.1 per cent of BTC, while Socar holds 25 per cent. Other shareholders include US Chev-ron and ConocoPhillips, Norway's StatoilHydro, Italy's ENI and France's Total.
Turkish Energy Minister Hilmi Guler was scheduled to inspect the site of the explosion in Refahiye county in eastern Turkey yesterday.
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