First Kashagan crude cargo to load from Caspian

LONDON. September 13. KAZINFORM Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) will load the first cargo of Kashagan crude at the end of October from the CPC Black Sea terminal, according to a loading program obtained by Bloomberg and two traders with knowledge of the project.
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The 93,500 metric ton shipment will be shared between Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), according to the program. This will be the first time that crude from the Kashagan oil field in Kazakh waters is exported via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal, the traders said, asking not to be identified because the information is confidential.

Kashagan, slated to produce as much as 370,000 barrels a day during its first phase, has been pushed back several times from its original 2005 start date. Costs of the project inKazakhstan reached $48 billion, more than double early estimates. The addition of sweet, or low-sulfur, crude may bring some relief to European refiners facing rising feedstock costs amid halts of exports from Libya and North Sea field outages, Kazinform refers to Bloomberg.

"CPC is decent quality light crude, better than Kirkuk and similar to Libyan grades," said Andrewy Kryuchenkov, global commodities strategist at VTB Capital in London. In the long run it will certainly "add some competition in the Med basin, however it will take years for maximum capacity, and the short term market impact will be limited."

Exxon Mobil didn't immediately reply to a phone call and an e-mail seeking comment. Hans Wenck, a spokesman for operator North Caspian Operating Co. in Astana, Kazakhstan, said he couldn't confirm the Exxon allocation. The CPC pipeline is one of two ways for Kashagan oil to be exported, the other being the KazTransOil link which ends in Samara, Russia, Wenck said.

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