The Kulevi Oil Terminal is one of SOCAR’s first and most important investments in Georgia. The history of the port of Redut - Kale, where the terminal is located, begins in 1804 with the construction of the Redut Fortress and later the port. Although the port lost its importance in the early twentieth century, in 1999 the Georgian government decided to build the Kulevi Oil Terminal on the site of the former port. Thus, the Georgian government estimated that under the Contract of the Century launched by Azerbaijan, Georgian ports will not be able to cope with the expected volume of oil and oil products in the future. SOCAR acquired Kulevi Terminal in December 2006 and finished its construction. Finally, in May 2008, the Kulevi Oil Terminal was launched for the transit of oil and oil products.
Oil and oil products transported by ship and rail are unloaded here, stored in tanks and then loaded on ships and transported. While Poti Terminal has an annual capacity of one million tons of oil (an additional 4 million tonnes of dry cargo) and Supsa Terminal has an annual capacity of 8 million tons of oil, Kulevi Terminal can load and unload 10 million tons of oil and oil products per year.
The main products are crude oil, petroleum fuel, diesel fuel, methanol, aviation kerosene, butane-butylene fraction (bbf), propylene, liquid pyrolysis resin, naphtha (gasoline-ligroin fraction), isopropyl alcohol, ultra-low sulfur diesel (ulsd), hydrocarbon products such as industrial oil, hydrocarbon gas condensate, para-xylene and benzene.
Kulevi Terminal storage consists of 28 tanks with a total capacity of 407,000 m³. The terminal has 6 piers, which can simultaneously unload 208 railway cars. In addition, in 2012, an unloading trestle was put into operation for unloading liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and loading it into gas tankers.
As a result of the expansion projects implemented since 2015, new products for the overpass corridor, such as methanol, paraxylene and benzene, as well as fuel oil with high freezing temperatures of Central Asian origin, have been transported through the terminal.
In an effort to further develop the terminal’s loading capacity and take into account the needs of the overpass corridor, an expansion project is currently underway to build and commission new technological facilities and equipment for unloading bitumen products at the terminal.
Since 2008, about 30 million tons of oil and oil products have been received and loaded on 2,149 sea tankers through the Kulevi Oil Terminal.
The mentioned features and favourable geographical position of the terminal made it competitive in the region and it attracts many large oil companies. For example, since May 2010, Kulevi Terminal has been cooperating with Tengizchevroil, one of the largest oil companies in Kazakhstan. On several occasions, The Kulevi Oil Terminal won the Most Modernised Oil Terminal and Oil Terminal with the Best Infrastructure awards of the year.