The 1,054-mile Baku-Ceyhan pipeline travels through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey before reaching the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

“Little additional oil has been found in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian in the past decade,” the Wall Street Journal reported October 22. “Contrary to previous expectations, Caspian oil won’t ease the tightening hold of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil titans.” Oil production from the region will double to 2 million barrels a day by 2015, but even this will not nearly match projected increases of 15 million barrels a day from OPEC nations over the same period.

Reserves from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are estimated at between 20 billion and 35 billion barrels, says the business daily. The higher figure would put the oil deposits on a par with that of Libya, and half the size of Venezuela’s reserves. By contrast, Saudi Arabia holds some 260 billion barrels of proven reserves. Oil from the Caspian is “not the substitute for Persian Gulf oil that we’ve been looking for,” lamented one Washington-based energy industry analyst.

The U.S. rulers have made deeper inroads into the former Soviet republics at the expense of Moscow, and the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline plays an important role in its plans: the 15-year project bypasses Russian territory in directing new oil discoveries found in coastal waters off Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

U.S. deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs Laura Kennedy, on a recent trip to the region, told Azeri president Ilham Aliyev October 28 that the developing collaboration between their two governments had reached a level of “strategic partnership.” U.S. Special Forces and Marines completed a training program with the Georgian military earlier this year.

An agreement between the Russian and Azeri governments calls for the annual transport of 2.5 million tons of oil through Russian territory in the Baku-Novorossiik pipeline. The deputy prime minister of Azerbaijan said the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline would not affect the deal.

But Russian oil executive Semyon Vainshtok of Transneft disagreed. Vainshtok told the Interfax news agency October 19 that the opening of the new southern route would have a tremendous impact on the Russian oil business. “I don’t think Azerbaijan will fulfill the intergovernmental agreement, so the pipeline [through Russian territory] will stand idle,” he said.  
 
 
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