Free Republic

<p>Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc expects that the revolution in Georgia will have no bearing on a planned $3.6 billion oil pipeline that crosses the country, said Chief Executive Officer Lord Browne.</p> <p>A BP-led group is building a 1 million barrel-a-day capacity pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, that will cross Georgia and Turkey, ending at Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean Sea.</p>

WASHINGTON - The World Bank (news - web sites) agreed Tuesday to provide $250 million in financing for a $3.6 billion pipeline that would bring oil from the Caspian Sea region through Turkey to Western markets. While the loan is only a small fraction of the cost of the planned Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, the financing has been viewed as crucial for the project to attract private financial support. The executive board of the International Finance Corp., the World Bank's private investment arm, approved the financing despite requests by some environmentalists and human rights groups that a decision be postponed until some...

Turkish state pipeline company Botas said on Thursday the detailed engineering phase for the Turkish section of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline had been completed on August 28. The project remains firmly on the original budget and schedule to be completed in time for the first oil from the full field development of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshi oilfield in Azerbaijan, as planned in early 2005," Botas said. The 1,760 km pipeline is due to carry up to one million barrels per day of Caspian oil to world markets through Georgia and Turkey. Botas said in a statement the completion of the detailed engineering...

WASHINGTON - Sixty-four mainly European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are demanding that British Petroleum (BP) meet tough conditions on a proposed multibillion-dollar Caspian oil and gas pipeline before it receives any financing from public agencies. Potential backers of the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline include the World Bank and national export credit agencies. BP, which leads a consortium of oil companies that includes Italy's Eni, Statoil of Norway, and California-based Unocal, has said it will need hundreds of millions of dollars in what its chief executive, Sir John Browne, referred to as "free public money" to help finance the construction of the US$3 billion...