The State Statistical Committee gave APA the pipeline's January to July accounting on Monday evening: 14,773.2 thousand tonnes through BTC, 8.6% less than a year earlier, and 76.8% of everything Azerbaijan's trunk pipelines moved. Oil from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan made up 2,618.5 thousand tonnes of it, a 17.7% share. The rest was Azerbaijan's own.
Set those seven months against the system they are supposed to back up. The CPC carried 33.35 million tonnes in the first half of 2026, by KazMunayGas's operational report, which is about 184,000 tonnes a day. At that rate, BTC's entire seven-month Central Asian volume passes through the CPC system in about 14 days.
The comparison is unfair in exactly the way that matters. BTC was never built as Kazakhstan's route: its transit share has stayed under a fifth of a shrinking total, and four fifths of its load is Azerbaijani oil, which fell 4.6% through the line last year by the same committee's count. A pipeline losing its base load has spare room. That spare room is the entire case for the reroute.
The case has numbers on the other side too. KazMunayGas's own 2026 plan for BTC is 1.7 million tonnes, a figure its chief executive Askhat Khasenov gave on 10 August alongside his verdict that the CPC has no alternative “by economics, by volumes”. The energy ministry's redistribution announcement of the same day named Atyrau to Samara and China and published no volumes; none has surfaced since.
What the transit leg is actually doing sits in the same table. Its 2025 volume fell 22.2%, to 4.1 million tonnes. This year's seven months, at 2.6 million, run slightly ahead of last year's average monthly pace. That is what a real but modest redistribution looks like: extra cargoes at the margin of a route sized for the margin.
That spare room is the entire case for the reroute.
What changes next is priced elsewhere. September loading programmes are the first place a larger Kazakh shift would have to appear, against a CPC Blend discount last quoted on 12 August near $4.60 below Brent and a Novorossiysk charter priced the same week at $440,948 a day. The consultative meeting of the region's presidents in Awaza on 8 October is the first political venue after that. Until then, Baku's monthly table is the only meter running on the alternative route, and it counts in thousands of tonnes.
Correction, 18 September 2026: as published, this piece measured BTC's seven-month Central Asian volume against 8.59 million tonnes given as the CPC's June throughput, and put the comparison at 9 days in the headline and 8 in the lead. That figure is not the volume the pipeline transported. Against the CPC's own half-year rate in KazMunayGas's operational report, 33.35 million tonnes from January to June, the comparison is about 14 days. The headline, the lead and the paragraph carrying the arithmetic have been corrected.