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The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (Socar) is reported to have received a bunker supply licence from Turkey's Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) to begin supplying marine fuels to customers at the port of Ceyhan, Turkey.

According to local reports, Socar has also established a tie-up with Delta Rubis - a joint venture company owned by Turkey's Delta Petrol and French firm Rubis, which operates the largest independent oil terminal in the Mediteranean, situated in Ceyhan.

The Azerbaijani oil and gas giant is said to have signed a 5-year storage and distribution agreement with Delta Rubis as part of a joint strategy to develop Ceyhan into a key bunkering location in the Mediterranean.

Delta Rubis CEO, Sami Habbab is quoted as saying that he expects bunker sales to reach 2 million tonnes within the next five years.

Located in the south-east region of Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast, Ceyhan lies at the hub of two pipelines: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, bringing crude oil from the Caspian Sea, and the Kirkuk-Ceyhan (KC) pipeline, which brings crude from Kirkuk in Iraq.

This area of the Eastern Mediterranean looks set to become a key logistical hub for the region’s oil products, with inter-Mediterranean flows, exports to Africa and Asia, and proximity to the Suez Canal and the Black Sea.

The Ceyhan storage terminal currently has a capacity of 650,000 cubic metres (cbm), contracted to a customer base of international oil operators. An expansion project to build a 2.3-kilometre (km) jetty and a tank farm will expand the depot's total capacity to over 1 million cubic metres (cbm).