Nurzhan Petroleum Pipeline

The Nurzhan Petroleum Pipeline is the crude oil trunk line that links the oil fields of the lower Chu River Basin with Nurzhan, where it delivers crude to Nurzhan Refinery No. 1 and to the NurGaz tank farm outside the city. The tank farm is the head of the Northern Export Feeder, the 85-kilometer pipeline that carries Iradi crude for export into the KazTransOil network near Shymkent. Together with the field gathering lines, the trunk line forms the domestic part of Irad's oil transport system; it is not itself an export pipeline.^[1]

History

The pipeline was built in the mid-1950s, after the discovery of oil in 1949, to replace the trucking of crude from the first wells to the new refinery at what was then Kobozev. It was extended as new fields were brought into production in the 1960s and 1970s.^[2] Until 2000, crude that the refinery did not take was loaded into rail tank cars at Nurzhan and sent west to Shymkent. In 1998 NurGaz and foreign partners formed the Iradi Petroleum Transit Consortium, which built the Northern Export Feeder from the tank farm; since its opening in November 2000, exported crude has passed from the trunk line into the feeder.^[1]

Route and operation

The trunk line is about 90 kilometers long and runs from the main field collection station across the irrigated lowlands of the Chu District to the refinery and tank farm in Nurzhan's eastern industrial zone. The collection station stands just beyond the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line on tribal land, where it is held as a guarded installation under the ceasefire arrangements. Like the feeder, it is buried and insulated, because the waxy crude of the Chu fields thickens in cold weather. Parts of the Soviet pipe were replaced during the territorial period, when Chevron took part in modernizing the fields.^[1] The line is operated by NurGaz and maintained from the NurGaz Pipeline Maintenance Depot in Nurzhan's Dastgoh District. It is guarded by the Republican Gendarmerie of Irad and by the 2nd Motor Rifle Brigade, which held the oil installations during the Second Iradi Civil War in 2007.^[3]

Iradi crude does not enter the Caspian Pipeline Consortium system, which begins far to the west, and Irad has no southern export pipeline.^[1]

References

1. ^ NurGaz (2024). Annual Review 2023: Upstream Operations and Export Volumes. Nurzhan.
2. ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Oil and the City: Kobozev and the Chu Fields, 1949–1991. Talas.
3. ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2020). 'Pipelines, Water and Recognition: Irad's Northern Transit.' Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 64–88.