Bitumen Supply to Georgia: Black Sea Ports, Overland Routes and Transit

Georgia occupies the narrow ground between the Greater Caucasus in the north and the Lesser Caucasus in the south, with the Black Sea on its western edge and Azerbaijan on its eastern one. It is a small country by area, and almost the whole of its road and rail network is organised around a single axis running from the eastern border, through Tbilisi, along the trough between the two mountain systems and down to the sea at Poti and Batumi. That axis is not merely a national road network. It is the western land segment of the corridor that links Central Asia and the Caspian to the Black Sea and onward to Turkey and Europe, and it is one of the alignments by which landlocked Armenia can reach deep water.

For a bitumen buyer this produces a page that has to be read on two levels at once. On the first level Georgia is an ordinary destination: a road programme, a set of climate zones, a specification practice and a delivery address. On the second level Georgia is a transit country, which means that a consignment arriving at a Georgian frontier may be entering the country or may simply be travelling across it. Those two situations are handled under different customs procedures, evidenced by different documents, secured in different ways and subject to different obligations. Confusing them at the enquiry stage produces a quotation that cannot be executed.

The structural fact that shapes the routing

Georgia has four land neighbours and no others: Russia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, and Armenia and Turkey to the south. It is the only market in this overland group that has to be reached across an intermediate customs territory, and that single fact shapes every overland consignment. Material moving up from the origin country cannot cross one frontier and arrive; it has to enter and leave a third country first. As a matter of geography that means one of two intermediate territories. The first is Azerbaijan, entered in the south and crossed the length of the country to the Georgian border in Kvemo Kartli or Kakheti. The second, on a different alignment, is Armenia, entered in the far south in the Aras valley and crossed north to the Georgian border on the Debed. Either way the cargo is itself in transit before it becomes a Georgian import, and the paperwork has to be built for that from the beginning rather than adapted to it later.

The second structural fact: there is a coast

The landlocked markets in this group have no alternative to the road. Georgia does. It has a Black Sea coastline with commercial ports at Poti and Batumi, reached from world shipping through the Turkish straits, and that puts a genuine choice of mode in front of a buyer rather than a single route to accept. The two options are not close substitutes: they differ in transport document, in Incoterms rule, in the unit the cargo is shipped in, in lead time, in where delay is likely to occur and in what has to happen next if the cargo is going further. Choosing between them is the first commercial decision on this market and it is treated at length below.

The five things that decide a Georgian order

• Destination or transit. Is the binder being consumed in Georgia, or is Georgia the middle of the journey? This decides the customs procedure, the guarantee, the documents and who is accountable at each stage.
• Which routing. A Black Sea arrival at Poti or Batumi, or an overland approach through Azerbaijan. Quantity, packing, the final delivery point and whether the cargo continues afterwards all pull on this decision.
• Which idiom the tender is written in. European practice is influential here and legacy GOST designations remain in circulation. A tender may be drafted in either, and the supplier has to read the document rather than assume.
• The wet end and the cold end of the specification. Western Georgia is one of the wettest places in the region and the plateaus and passes are genuinely cold. Moisture damage and low-temperature cracking are the two durability problems, and they are controlled in different places.
• The delivery term and the named place. An overland movement needs a rule that works with any mode, and a named place precise enough to be found, discharged at and cleared at.

What this page will not tell you

It will not state that any crossing, corridor, railway or sailing is currently open, running to a schedule, or available for bitumen. Route status in the Caucasus changes and cannot be verified from a web page; geography is stated because geography is stable, and status is left to the freight forwarder who is accountable for it. It states no transit times, no freight rates, no vehicle payloads, no duty rates and no tariff treatment. It names no haulier, forwarder, terminal, refinery or client, and claims no presence, office or shipping history in the country. It states no licensing, sanctions or trade-restriction position for any country; buyers must take their own legal and compliance advice on whether and how a transaction may proceed. Where this page reaches the edge of what can be stated honestly, it says so, because a fabricated operational detail is something a buyer could plan a shipment on.

The Black Sea frontage

Poti stands at the mouth of the Rioni in Samegrelo and has long been the principal dry cargo and container gateway of the country. It sits at the western end of the main railway and at the western end of the east-west highway, which is why it functions as the sea end of the corridor rather than simply as a regional port. A free industrial zone was established adjacent to it, and free industrial zones also exist at Kutaisi and Tbilisi; whether such a zone is a useful structure for a particular bitumen consignment is a question for the zone operator and a customs broker, not an assumption to be made from the existence of the zone.

Batumi lies further south in Adjara, close to the Turkish frontier, and has a long history as an oil terminal at the western end of rail and pipeline routes from the Caspian, alongside general cargo, ferry and passenger traffic. Two further coastal facilities sit on the same stretch of shore and are worth locating correctly, because they are frequently confused with the two commercial ports. Kulevi lies north of Poti at the mouth of the Khobistskali. Supsa lies south of Poti, on the Guria coast, and was built as the coastal end of the western crude export pipeline running from Azerbaijan. Both were designed around specific hydrocarbon products and specific shippers; nothing on this page should be read as a statement that either handles bitumen, and neither is named here as a counterparty of any kind. A deep-water port at Anaklia, north of Poti near the Enguri mouth, has been discussed publicly for years, and its status is not something this page states or that any shipment plan should rest on.

The point to hold onto is a commercial one rather than a nautical one. Heated tankage, drum handling equipment, covered storage and the ability to receive a particular packing are contracted commercial arrangements with terminal operators. They are never attributes that can be inferred from a port name. Confirm what the receiving facility can actually do before a parcel is fixed or a packing is chosen.

The east-west trough

Between the two mountain systems the country divides into a wet western half and a drier eastern half, separated by the Likhi range, the transverse ridge that joins the Greater and Lesser Caucasus. The main road and rail alignments cross it near the Rikoti pass between Zestaponi and Khashuri, and that crossing is the hinge of the entire national network: everything moving between Tbilisi and the sea passes through it. West of the ridge lie Imereti, the flat and marshy Colchis lowland around Poti and Samegrelo, and Guria and Adjara on the coast. East of it lie Shida Kartli, Tbilisi, Kvemo Kartli and the dry plains of Kakheti. A long-running programme of highway construction has been under way on this axis; the state of any particular section on a given date is a matter for a forwarder rather than for this page.

North: the mountain crossing toward Russia

The Georgian Military Highway runs north from Tbilisi through Mtskheta and the Aragvi valley, climbs to the Jvari pass at roughly 2379 metres above the ski resort at Gudauri, drops through Stepantsminda and the Darial gorge, and reaches the frontier with Russia at Zemo Larsi. It is the historic route across the main Caucasus ridge and it is a high-altitude alpine road, exposed to snow, ice and avalanche through the winter months. Maps show other alignments across the ridge; none of them should be planned on without written confirmation from a forwarder that the route is currently usable for commercial freight of this description.

South: Armenia, and the road to Turkey

The main north-south road link runs from Tbilisi down the Debed valley to the crossing at Sadakhlo, facing Bagratashen on the Armenian side. A second and higher alignment leaves the Javakheti plateau at Guguti, facing Gogavan. Armenia is landlocked, and the route north through Georgia to the Black Sea is one of its principal outlets to the wider world; which of Armenia’s land routes are usable at any given moment is a status question for a forwarder and is not stated here. Toward Turkey there are two road approaches: Sarpi on the Black Sea coast just south of Batumi, on the coastal road toward Hopa and Trabzon, and Vale in Samtskhe-Javakheti near Akhaltsikhe, facing the Posof district. These matter to a bitumen buyer for a reason that has nothing to do with buying: they are the exits, and a Georgian trading buyer may be re-forwarding cargo through one of them.

East: the crossings from Azerbaijan

The corridor enters Georgia from Azerbaijan at the Red Bridge crossing, known in Georgian as Tsiteli Khidi, in Kvemo Kartli near Gardabani on the Tbilisi to Ganja and Baku road. A second crossing at Lagodekhi in Kakheti faces Balakan in north-western Azerbaijan and serves the north-eastern part of the country. For a consignment arriving overland from the south-east, one of these is where the cargo actually becomes a Georgian matter, after having already entered and left Azerbaijan.

The railway and the gauge break

Georgian Railway works on 1520 mm broad gauge, the standard of the post-Soviet network, and its main line runs from the Azerbaijani border through Tbilisi and over the Likhi crossing to Poti and Batumi. To the east it connects to the Azerbaijani network at the same gauge, which is why the trans-Caspian corridor uses it. To the south-west, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars line reaches Turkey near Kartsakhi in Javakheti, and because Turkey works on 1435 mm standard gauge a gauge-change and transhipment facility was built at Akhalkalaki. That break of gauge is a permanent physical fact of the corridor and it is worth understanding even if you never use rail, because it explains why a great deal of freight that could in principle move by train through Georgia moves by road instead. Whether rail is available for this commodity, in this packing, on any given date, is a question for a forwarder and is not stated here.

The two situations

The first situation is import for use in Georgia. The goods are declared for home use, whatever import charges apply are assessed and settled, and the goods are released into free circulation. From that point they are ordinary domestic goods: they can be stored, sold, decanted, reblended, delivered to an asphalt plant and used, with no further customs interest in them. The consignee is a Georgian buyer, the delivery point is a Georgian address, and the transaction looks like every other import transaction in the trade.

The second situation is transit. The goods enter Georgian customs territory but are not imported. They travel across the country under customs supervision, normally under seal, against a transit declaration, backed by a guarantee that stands in for the charges that would be due if the goods failed to leave, within a time limit, and to a nominated office of exit where the procedure is discharged. Nothing is released into free circulation. Critically, the goods cannot be dealt with along the way: they are not to be opened, decanted, reblended, sampled or partly delivered without customs involvement, because the whole procedure rests on the goods that leave being demonstrably the goods that entered.

The commercial consequences run in every direction. A transit movement has a guarantee behind it, and somebody has to provide it. It has a time limit, and somebody is exposed if it is missed. It has an office of exit, which means the routing is fixed rather than opportunistic. And it ends somewhere else entirely, which means the person you are selling to may not be the person who ultimately uses the material.

The frameworks a road transit normally runs on

Two international instruments are the ones a buyer will hear named on a road movement of this kind, and it is worth knowing what each one is. The TIR system, under the customs convention on the international transport of goods under cover of TIR carnets, exists precisely to let a sealed road vehicle cross several customs territories on a single document with an internationally backed guarantee, rather than being cleared and re-guaranteed at every frontier. The CMR Convention, on the contract for the international carriage of goods by road, governs the carriage contract itself and gives the movement its consignment note and its liability regime. Whether either applies to your specific movement, in your packing, with your carrier, on your dates, is a question for the carrier and the forwarder, and this page does not assert that it does. What a buyer should take from it is structural: a road transit is a documented, guaranteed and time-limited procedure, not an informal drive across a country.

Free zones and bonded storage as a third situation

Free industrial zones exist in Georgia, adjacent to Poti and at Kutaisi and Tbilisi, and customs warehousing exists as a procedure in its own right. Both create a middle position in which goods are physically in the country but have not been imported into free circulation, which can be useful where a buyer wants to break a parcel down, hold stock close to several possible destinations, or decide later whether the material is going to a Georgian project or across a southern frontier. Whether bitumen can be handled at a given zone or warehouse, in a given packing, and what the customs consequences of doing so are, is a question for the zone or warehouse operator and a licensed broker. It is not something to assume from the existence of the facility.

Why the identity of your buyer matters more here

On a normal market you can treat the buyer as the consumer. In a transit country you cannot. A Georgian counterparty may be a contractor laying the material on a Georgian road, or a trader whose business is precisely that Georgia sits between other people, and who will re-forward the consignment south to Armenia or west toward Turkey. Ask which it is, because it changes three things. It changes the customs procedure, as above. It changes the packing decision, because the cargo has to survive two land legs and a second handling rather than one. And it changes the documentation, because the goods description, weights, marks and the certificate set have to remain coherent through a second movement in which you are not a party.

The unit is a truck, and the delivery term has to match

Georgia is the one market in this group where both units are live at once, which is precisely why the distinction has to be made explicitly rather than assumed. A parcel arriving at Poti or Batumi is counted in containers, and the loading arithmetic published elsewhere on this site applies to it: 150 kg drums give 80 drums and about 12 MT in a 20 foot FCL, 180 kg drums about 14.4 MT, 185 kg drums about 14.8 MT, and 1 MT jumbo or poly bags 20 bags and about 20 MT. A consignment approaching over the Red Bridge or Lagodekhi is counted in vehicles, and none of those figures govern it. A flatbed of drums or a heated road tanker is the commercial quantum there, and its payload is set by the vehicle, by the axle-load and gross-weight limits applying along the route it actually takes, and by the carrier’s own authorisations. Georgian routes make that qualification sharper than most: an alignment over the Likhi crossing, up the Debed or across Javakheti is not the same weight proposition as a flat run along the Kakhetian plain. This page states no payload figure, because an invented one is worse than no figure at all. Ask the carrier through your forwarder, name the intended alignment when you ask, and build the order size around the answer rather than around a container equivalent.

The delivery term then has to follow the unit. On most markets this site covers there is only one honest answer; on Georgia there are two, and the mistake is carrying a habit from one routing into the other. Under Incoterms 2020, FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF are rules for sea and inland waterway transport and they belong to the Poti or Batumi case. Write one of them over a truck coming in from Kvemo Kartli and the contract turns on a ship’s rail the cargo never crosses, which leaves the moment of risk transfer genuinely undefined. The rules built to work with any mode are the ones for the land case: CPT and CIP, where risk passes on handing the goods to the first carrier, and DAP and DPU, where the seller carries the goods to a named place. DDP additionally puts import clearance and charges on the seller, which in a transit country is a heavier undertaking than it looks and should never be agreed casually. Name the place precisely in every case: Tbilisi, Rustavi, Kutaisi, Poti, Batumi and Akhalkalaki are entirely different propositions on a map with a mountain ridge across the middle of it, and a city name alone leaves the last leg undefined and its cost unallocated. Two Georgian refinements follow. Where the cargo is in transit, the named place and the office of exit have to be consistent with each other. And where a term is agreed before the routing is settled, it will be wrong for one of the two routings, so settle the routing first.

Bulk, and the one regulatory line that must be settled first

A heated tanker is the packing that most repays a short land leg, and the eastern approach into Kvemo Kartli and Kakheti is short in exactly that sense. What decides it is not the supplier and not the freight arithmetic but the receiving yard: heated storage of adequate capacity, a compatible discharge connection, a pump, and the ability to take the whole load in one operation. Where those are present, bulk takes out the drum cost, the decanting labour and the steel disposal problem at once. Where they are absent, drums are the correct answer and nothing on a freight quotation changes that. Georgia adds two qualifications the neighbouring markets do not. The first is transit: a sealed movement travelling to an office of exit is not a movement in which product can be conveniently split between two receivers, so if the cargo is passing through, the customs procedure decides the packing rather than the other way round. The second is terrain and season. A tanker that has to hold temperature over the Likhi crossing in winter, or climb onto the Javakheti plateau, is a different proposition from one running the flat Rustavi road, and the discharge window at the far end is correspondingly less forgiving.

One regulatory line has to be settled before a tanker is booked rather than after. Where bitumen is offered for carriage above 100 °C it is classified as UN 3257, elevated temperature liquid, n.o.s., Class 9 under the UN model regulations from which the European road transport rules are drawn; packed bitumen moving at ambient temperature is treated differently. Whether those rules bite on your movement, and what marking, documentation, equipment and driver qualification follow, is a question for the carrier and the forwarder. It matters more on this market than on a purely domestic one, because a consignment that is later re-forwarded across a second frontier may be assessed twice against the same body of rules by two different authorities.

Documentary discipline is the defence at a land frontier

A sea shipment has one chokepoint and it is the port. A Georgian overland shipment has at least two frontiers, and if the cargo is in transit it has a third moment of exposure that no sea route has at all: the discharge of the transit procedure at the office of exit, where the guarantee is released only if the goods, the seals and the paperwork still agree with the declaration lodged at entry. The frontier failure modes are the ordinary ones — queueing, vehicle and driver documentation, weighing, permit scope, commodity classification at the crossing, the hours the post actually works — and none of them produce a demurrage invoice. They produce a vehicle standing still, and on a transit movement they also eat the clock the procedure runs against. The defence is documentary consistency held to a stricter standard than a sea shipment needs, because the same description has to survive more inspections. Keep the goods description word for word identical across the sales contract, the commercial invoice, the packing list and the transport document, and identical again on any onward transit declaration. Carry the safety data sheet with the vehicle rather than only in the file. State the packing explicitly as new steel drums where drums are used, and confirm that drum tare is excluded from invoiced net weight. One physical point sits underneath all of it: the Georgian alignments run over passes and through gorges, and sustained road vibration is harder on a drum seam than a container stow, so a consignment that will cross two frontiers and be handled twice is the last place to economise on packaging.

Why both idioms are present

The European influence is straightforward to explain. A country building and rehabilitating highway to modern design standards tends to import the specification framework along with the design methods, and where a project is internationally financed and internationally supervised the technical references usually travel with the design. Georgia maintains a national standards and metrology agency, GEOSTM, through which international and European standards are adopted as national standards; the exact designation form used for an adopted standard should be taken from the tender document itself rather than guessed at, and this page does not invent a national standard number for road bitumen.

The GOST influence is equally straightforward. The regional technical vocabulary was formed inside the interstate standards system, engineers trained in it, older project documents were written in it, and material arriving overland from the east is frequently described in it. The result is not confusion so much as bilingualism: two ways of writing down the same commercial intention, with different requirement tables behind them.

What the European standard actually controls

EN 12591 is the European standard for paving grade bitumens, and it classifies by penetration at 25 °C into bands such as 35/50, 50/70, 70/100, 100/150 and 160/220. The properties around that classification are what matter to a supplier assembling a certificate: penetration at 25 °C to EN 1426, softening point by ring and ball to EN 1427, resistance to hardening by the rolling thin-film oven procedure to EN 12607-1 with change of mass, retained penetration and increase in softening point reported on the residue, flash point to EN ISO 2592, and solubility to EN 12592. For low-temperature behaviour the European system reaches for the Fraass breaking point to EN 12593, which appears as a requirement for some grades and as a national or project-level addition for others.

What the GOST family controls

In the interstate idiom, viscous road bitumen is designated BND, where the final letter carries the meaning road; the related BN designation drops it and denotes petroleum bitumen without the road qualification, held to different requirements. The long-standing reference is GOST 22245-90, with the familiar bands BND 40/60, BND 60/90, BND 90/130, BND 130/200 and BND 200/300. A later interstate standard, GOST 33133-2014, restructures the requirements and renumbers the bands so that they line up more closely with the European set. Both circulate. Read the edition from the tender and take the requirement values from that edition rather than from a remembered table.

The point where offers go wrong

The trap is treating an overlapping penetration band as equivalence. Bitumen 60/70 to ASTM D946, the standard Middle East export designation, has a penetration at 25 °C of 60 to 70 dmm. That is a 10 dmm window, and it sits inside the 20 dmm window of the EN 12591 band 50/70 and inside the 30 dmm window the designation BND 60/90 implies. It is tempting to call that a match, and it is not, for three separate reasons.

The first reason is that the containment runs one way only, and traders routinely read it in both. Every 60/70 batch satisfies the penetration line of BND 60/90, because the narrower window lies wholly inside the wider one. The converse is false: a binder correctly supplied as BND 60/90 may measure anywhere up to 90 dmm, so a large part of that band is softer than 70 dmm and would fail a 60/70 penetration requirement outright. The same asymmetry holds against EN 50/70, where anything above 70 dmm is out. Read the direction of the argument carefully — offering 60/70 against a BND 60/90 tender is a proposition worth discussing on the penetration line alone, whereas accepting BND 60/90 material against a 60/70 order is accepting a band you did not buy.

The second reason is that the requirement tables differ in what they control at all. A Middle East export certificate written to a penetration-grade specification typically reports penetration, softening point, ductility at 25 °C, flash point, solubility and an ageing result by thin-film oven test. A European or GOST-derived table will ask for things it does not contain — a Fraass breaking point, or penetration and ductility at 0 °C, or an ageing result expressed as a permitted rise in softening point rather than as a retained penetration percentage. Those missing lines are not a formality. They are the lines that describe what happens to the binder on a January morning at 1800 metres in Javakheti.

The third reason is that the same physical concern is measured by different procedures in each system, and the numbers are not interchangeable. Short-term ageing is a clear case: the European system uses the rolling thin-film oven procedure of EN 12607-1, the interstate system has its own heating procedure with its associated checks, and the ASTM export specification commonly reports the thin-film oven test of ASTM D1754. All three are trying to predict the same thing and none of their results can be substituted for another’s.

The instruction, in order

• Get the clause. Ask the buyer to send the specification extract from the tender itself, naming the standard and its edition, rather than a grade name in an email.
• Quote in the same words. If the tender says 50/70, quote 50/70. If it says BND 60/90, quote BND 60/90 and address the requirement table behind it. Do not silently translate.
• List every controlled property. Compare the cited standard’s property list against the Certificate of Analysis you intend to offer, line by line, before the batch is certified. Missing tests are cheap to add in advance and expensive to resolve after a cargo has crossed two frontiers.
• Insist on a batch-specific certificate. Measured values tied to the material actually loaded, not a typical-values data sheet reissued for every consignment.
• Get substitutions approved in writing. A cross-reference table is a basis for discussion with the engineer, never a defence at delivery.

One further possibility is worth naming. Where a project is designed by an international consultant, a performance-graded specification under AASHTO M320 may appear instead of either idiom above, with the binder characterised by dynamic shear rheometer to AASHTO T315 and by bending beam rheometer to AASHTO T313. A PG grade cannot be inferred from a penetration grade, and if a tender is written that way the testing has to be commissioned specifically. Read the document.