Ceyhan Oil Terminals

Ceyhan is home to two large terminals where crude oil from Azerbaijan and Iraq is loaded onto tankers. This page covers the terminals, anchorages and service rules, and how to follow this traffic with VesselCall.

Port profile: location, terminals and cargo

The Ceyhan terminals sit on jetties reaching into the Gulf of Iskenderun from Gölovası, on the Mediterranean coast of Adana province. The area is overseen by the Ceyhan regional harbour master. The two main terminals are:

• BTC Ceyhan Marine Terminal (Haydar Aliyev Terminal): The marine terminal of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline. Its jetty, about 2.5 km long, has two berths and serves tankers of roughly 80,000-320,000 DWT.
• BOTAŞ Ceyhan Terminal: The terminal of the Iraq-Türkiye crude oil pipeline, owned and operated by the state pipeline company BOTAŞ. Two of its four berths take tankers of up to 320,000 DWT, and the other two up to 150,000 DWT.

The harbour master’s list also includes the coal and dry bulk piers of the İsken and EMBA power plants, Sanko port for dry bulk, general cargo and project cargo, Sönmez Çimento port in the Yumurtalık Free Zone, and Toros Gübre port.

Vessel traffic and anchorages

Ceyhan’s traffic is tanker-heavy: large crude tankers from Aframax up to VLCC size coming to load, plus bulk carriers calling at the power plants and other piers. According to bp, BTC crude was loaded onto 283 tankers at Ceyhan in 2025. Statistics from Türkiye’s Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure show 1,373 vessels calling in the Ceyhan harbour master’s area the same year.

Flows on the Iraq-Türkiye pipeline stopped in March 2023 and restarted on September 27, 2025. Because these flows depend on political and commercial developments, traffic at the BOTAŞ terminal can vary.

The Ceyhan harbour master defines three anchorages. We calculated the distances below from the official coordinates, measured from a point between the two terminals’ jetty heads:

Pilotage is compulsory, and the pilot boarding points lie about 1-5 nm off the terminals.

Which service companies find work in Ceyhan?

Serving ships at Ceyhan follows different rules from an ordinary port. According to the terminal documents, no bunkers are available at the jetties, stores and provisions go out to the ship only by boat, and repairs that need hot work are prohibited. Firms that find work here:

• Ship agents: The BTC terminal rules say the agent handles provisions, minor repairs, medical services, mail and crew changes. See ship agents.
• Surveyors: After loading, cargo measurements, including those by independent cargo surveyors, can be carried out at the anchorage. See marine surveyors.
• Ship chandlers: Suppliers who can plan boat deliveries together with the agent.
• Technical service and spare parts: Cold work services and spare part deliveries.

How VesselCall monitors Ceyhan

In Outreach, you select Ceyhan and set a range (radius). We suggest 10 nautical miles: that circle covers the BTC and BOTAŞ jetties, the pilot boarding points, the three anchorages and the İsken pier about 3 nm to the west. Iskenderun lies about 20 nm to the southeast, so the two areas stay separate; add it as a separate port to watch the whole gulf. A vessel never gets a second e-mail within 7 days.

VesselCall detects tankers, cargo ships and passenger ships inside the range and filters out tugs and pilot boats by default. Using the vessel’s IMO number, it identifies the ship manager or commercial manager, then the ISM manager, then the registered owner, and sends your introduction e-mail from your own company domain, in the recipient’s language.

The Data package records port calls at Ceyhan independently of e-mail sending: arrival, departure, length of stay, and whether the ship waited at anchor or at the jetty. Period reports show the split between crude tankers and bulk carriers, flags and the most frequent ship managers, and you can export the list to CSV or Excel. Records build up from the day monitoring starts.