the holding owned by Kazmunaigaz.
The other 50 percent is owned by Russian energy giant Lukoil.
Kazakhstan also awarded a consortium of French companies a deal
to take part in building a $2 billion oil
pipeline linking the vast Kashagan field,
which is now expected to begin production in 2012, to the Caspian. Oil will
be transported across the inland sea by
tanker to Azerbaijan and then pumped
by pipeline westwards to Europe, circumventing Russia.
That planned arrangement highlights a growing co-operation between
Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan when
it comes to exporting oil out of the
region. On a broader front, efforts
are also being stepped up to improve
the general political and economic
co-operation between all five countries
surrounding the Caspian Sea.
Earlier this year, for example, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed the establishment of the Caspian
Economic Cooperation Organization
to help strengthen moves to define
the legal status of the Caspian Sea and
which sectors are owned by each of the
five countries around it. According to
regional press reports, political analysts
do not expect an early breakthrough
on that but neither do they anticipate
the issue becoming a conflict over the
estimated 17 billion to 33 billion barrels
of proven oil reserves.
More immediately, though, Caspian
Sea oil and gas projects have felt the
impact of the global economic downturn and lower energy prices, confirm
industry observers. “I would say that
sector is marking time a bit at the moment,” commented one. “There are a
number of potential new projects to
come on stream but some of those have
been slowed down. They will happen
but later than was expected a couple of
years ago.”
As far as the region’s international
air cargo market is concerned, recent
airline industry developments could in
fact at first sight be taken as evidence
that the Caspian Sea air cargo market
has bucked otherwise generally negative global trends this year.
In early October, for example,
Russian scheduled freighter service
operator AirBridgeCargo Airlines, part
of the Volga-Dnepr group, introduced
a new weekly B747 freighter operation
from Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
into Almaty, Kazakhstan, adding that
“Kazakhstan is expected to generate
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1250Km
750Km
Uralsk
Atyrau
250Km
Aktau
Tbilisi
Yerevan
Turkmenbashi
Baku
