Kazakhstan hopes to match oil giant Saudi Arabia by producing eight million barrels of crude a day (400 million tons a year) within the next 20 years, a top energy official said on Friday, September 7.
The former Soviet republic last year produced just 670,000 barrels of oil a day, but expects to raise that figure to 800,000 barrels a day in 2001, said Energy Minister Vladimir Shkolnik.
"If Kazakhstan starts producing eight million barrels of oil per day (as Saudi Arabia does today) it will become a key supplier of hydrocarbon resources to the world," he said. Kazakh officials believe that the discovery of a potentially huge oil field on its sector of the Caspian Sea will catapult it into the ranks of the world's top crude producers.
The offshore Kashagan structure in western Kazakhstan is thought to be one of the largest oil fields to be discovered in the world over the last three decades and could hold anything from 10 to 50 billion barrels of crude.
Kazakhstan's oil exports have been hampered by repeated delays in construction of the first major oil pipeline leading from western Kazakhstan through Russia to the Black Sea port of Novorrossiisk.
The United States meanwhile has encouraged Kazakhstan to in future years to ship its oil through a still-unconstructed pipeline that would run beneath the Caspian Sea to Baku, and from there to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, bypassing Russia. –(AFP, Almaty)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
