Russia’s Interfax news agency reports that Azerbaijan, through its own facilities and plants abroad, now has an annual oil refining capacity of 30 million tonnes, President Ilham Aliyev has said, adding that demand for the country’s oil products and gas will only grow amid heightened geopolitical tensions.
According to the agency, the president made the remarks in a speech at the Eighth Congress of the New Azerbaijan Party. He said today’s geopolitical and economic reality is that a number of countries can no longer access energy resources as they once did, while Azerbaijan remains one of the few nations that produces and exports crude oil, oil products, natural gas, electricity, petrochemicals and fertilisers.
Quoting Aliyev, Interfax wrote that the crisis unfolding worldwide is largely linked to oil product supplies and that the situation could worsen further. Some traditional suppliers, he said, are already being forced to halt exports in order to meet domestic demand, and many countries have approached Azerbaijan asking it to send them the oil products it produces.
The outlet noted that, according to the president, of Azerbaijan’s 30-million-tonne refining capacity, 7 million tonnes come from the country’s own refinery, while the remaining 23 million tonnes come from facilities in Turkey and Italy. Aliyev described this as work completed in good time, noting that one plant was built from scratch in Turkey while two plants were acquired in Italy, adding that few states combined have a total capacity of 30 million tonnes across three countries.
The agency recalled that the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) signed an agreement in September 2025 to acquire a 99.82% stake in Italiana Petroli from Italy’s API Holding, with the deal closing on 8 May 2026. Valued at roughly €3 billion, the transaction gave SOCAR control of a network of more than 4,600 filling stations in Italy along with two refineries. In Turkey, the capacity of the Star refinery, in which SOCAR holds a stake, has been expanded from an initial 10 million tonnes to 13 million tonnes, with investment in the project totalling approximately $7 billion.
