Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev hopes to move oil from a potentially-vast field in Kazakhstan via a pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey, a US envoy said Friday.
"President Nazarbayev said in our meeting that he intends that early oil from Kashagan (oil field) would also use Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (pipeline)," said the US envoy on Caspian energy issues, Elizabeth Jones.
The president had said he felt the pipeline could provide a timely export route for the first oil produced from the field in western Kazakhstan, she said.
Nazarbayev wants oil from the Kashagan offshore field, which is being explored on the Kazakh sector of the Caspian shelf, to be produced from 2005. The US-backed pipeline from Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan is hoped to come on line in 2004.
However, Jones admitted that private companies producing oil in Kazakhstan would effectively make the decision on the most commercially viable route to transport their crude to world markets.
"The producers group will determine for itself the best transportation route but I believe they will do so in consultation with President Nazarbayev and his government," she said.
Countries including the United States and Iran are vying for control over the transportation of oil from this resource-rich but landlocked former Soviet state.
The United States is keen to see Kazakh oil transported via a proposed 1,700-kilometer (1,060-mile) link costing $2.4-to-$2.7 billion from Baku to Ceyhan as a way of reducing its dependence on Russia and cutting out Iran.
But many analysts believe a pipeline south to Iran would be more commercially viable.—AFP.
©--Agence France Presse 2001.
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
