Shell is still in talks with Turkey's Calik Enerji and Eni over the possibility of joining the Trans Anatolian Pipeline consortium, which plans to build a 1 million b/d line from Turkey's Black Sea coast to its Mediterranean oil hub of Ceyhan to bypass Turkey's crowded Bosphorus straits, Canan Edipoglu the head of Shell's Turkish subsidiary, the Shell Company of Turkey Limited, said at the 11th Eurasia Economic Summit in Istanbul.
Shell, in late 2006, announced that it had reached an agreement in principle with the TAP consortium partners and had begun talks over the company joining the consortium.
"We're still working on a feasibility study for the project and are looking at the shareholder agreement of the project," Edipoglu said, declining to be drawn on how long it might be before the company reached a decision.
"It'll be some time yet," she said, adding that Shell's interest in the project was confined to the pipeline itself and its possible use for transporting Shell-owned oil from Kazakhstan.
"We have our own exploration and production interests in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian and we're interested in ways of bringing that oil to market in the Mediterranean," she said, adding that the company had no interest in Calik and Eni's plans for building a refinery at Turkey's Mediterranean oil hub of Ceyhan in partnership with India's IOC.
"We already have a 1% stake in Tupras [currently Turkey's only oil refiner, which is majority owned by Turkey's Koc group] as well as refineries of our own around the world and we are not looking to get involved in any more," she said.
Separately, Osman Saim Dinc, the CEO of Calik Enerji, the holders of the license for the construction of the TAP line confirmed that talks with Shell were still on, but added that he did not expect any new announcements on the line to be made before the second half of this year at the earliest.
Although ground was officially broken on the TAP line early last year, progress subsequently stalled, apparently due to the failure of the consortium to secure sufficient volumes of crude to ensure the line's viability and problems faced by consortium partner Eni with its Kashagan prospect in Kazakhstan, which had been expected to provide around half of the line's capacity.
The consortium last year announced that it had changed the staring point of the line from Turkey's main Black Sea port of Ceyhan to the smaller port of Unye, 100 km to the east, in an attempt to reduce the length of the line and cut costs.
