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The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have claimed responsibility for sabotaging the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline near the town of Refahiye in eastern Turkey on Tuesday 5 August which has helped push up oil prices due to concerns over the security of the supply route.
It is the first blast ever reported on the £2.1bn supply route, which carries more than 1 per cent of the world's oil supply from Azerbaijan through Georgia and on to the Turkish Mediterranean coast. It is still unclear whether the explosion was accidental or caused by sabotage.
The BTC pipeline is 1,770km long and provides an alternative to the Russian transit network for Caspian crude oil, running from the Azeri capital of Baku, through the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, and on to Ceyhan in Turkey. Since the explosion, stocks at the oil depot in Ceyhan have been severely depleted and the pipeline's operators have stopped using reserves to load tankers at the port. Reports that the pipeline could be closed for up to a fortnight, along with the claim by the PKK, have added to supply concerns in the global oil market.
The explosion happened outside the PKK's usual area of operations in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey, where it has been fighting the Turkish military since 1984 in a campaign for self rule. They have, however, also claimed responsibility for a pipeline attack in March of this year that stopped the export of natural gas from Iran to Turkey for five days.
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