Oil is flowing unhindered through Turkey’s pipelines and waterways, one of the world’s largest energy trading corridors, after a coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed.
The Turkish straits are open to shipping traffic, an official at the Istanbul-based shipping center said by telephone on Saturday.
Crude oil shipments from Azerbaijan and Iraq into Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan are operating normally, a port agent said as BP PLC, operator of the Baku-Tifilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, confirmed the oil flow was uninterrupted.
“Our facilities in Turkey are open and operating normally,” BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mail in response to questions. “There are no disruptions to the flow of oil through the BTC pipeline.”
At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Turkey is a vital conduit of crude transport from Russia and Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. Millions of barrels of oil travel through the nation’s waterways and pipelines each day.
The country is also on the fringe of broader conflict in the Middle East, with Syria bordering Turkey’s southeastern edge. Oil futures rose as much as 1.9 percent on Friday after the coup began.
“Any uncertainty in that region almost invariably results in an increase in oil prices, particularly given the interaction between what goes on in Turkey with Syria,” Craig Pirrong, director of the Global Energy Management Institute at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, said on Friday in a telephone interview.
Analysts will be looking for whether there is a “spillover to the major oil producers,” he said.
Crude oil futures rose above US$46 a barrel in after-market trading in New York following the unrest, extending gains from a force majeure declared by Exxon Mobil Corp on crude shipments from Nigeria.
David Goldwyn, a former US State Department special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs in the administration of US President Barack Obama, said that it is too early to assess the impact on energy transportation from the unrest in Turkey.
The coup attempt was foiled after hours of clashes that saw tanks blockading roads, soldiers fighting police and warplanes bombing the parliament in Ankara. Senior generals were among more than 2,800 military personnel arrested during raids on Saturday, after clashes that left more than 200 dead, including several dozen coup participants.
The Turkish Straits, including the Bosporus and Dardanelles, are one of the world’s major choke points for seaborne crude transit, with about 2.9 million barrels of oil a day passing through in 2013, the latest year of data available from the US Energy Information Administration.
Turkey is home to pipelines that transport crude and condensate from nations including Iraq and Azerbaijan to Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean in southern Turkey.
BP’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline exported 67 million barrels of crude, or about 740,000 barrels a day, from the port in the first quarter, according to the British company.
At least 10 crude tankers were signaling Turkish ports at the time of the attempted coup, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
They included six Suezmax and two Aframax ships bound for Ceyhan and two Aframax ships destined for the Turkish Straits.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”