$6.3b Refinery Expected to Ease Turkey's Dependence on Foreign Oil

An oil refinery built by Azerbaijan on Turkey's Aegean coast went into operation on Friday amid hope of helping Ankara cut dependence on foreign refined oil products.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev attended the ceremony to inaugurate the Star Refinery, the first oil refinery ever built in Turkey in the past 30 years, Xinhua reported.
Addressing the ceremony, Erdogan said the Star Refinery is expected to cut Turkey's dependence on imported refined oil products significantly.
"It aims to save around $1.5 billion every year in imports of petroleum products," he added.
The refinery in the Aliaga district of Izmir province was built by SOCAR Turkey, a subsidiary of Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR, at a cost of $6.3 billion.
Producing diesel, jet fuel, LPG, petroleum coke and xylene, the plant will increase Turkey’s 28.1 million ton annual oil processing capacity by a third.
In a statement, the Turkish Presidency called it "one of the largest petroleum operations carried out in recent years in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa."