Agence France Presse — English
May 25, 2005 Wednesday 10:42 AM GMT
Key East-West oil pipeline launched, breaks Russia grip on Caspian
energy
BAKU
A major new US-backed pipeline to bring oil directly from the Caspian
Sea to Western markets and break Russia’s longtime grip on vast
energy resources from Central Asia to Turkey was formally launched
Wednesday in a ceremony attended by presidents and dignitaries.
“Some did not believe in the realization of this project, some tried
to disrupt it, but the support of the United States and the activity
of BP helped realize the project,” Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said
at the ceremony to inaugurate the four-billion-dollar initiative.
The presidents of Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan were joined
by other VIPs including US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and the
head of British energy giant BP, John Browne, for the formal launch
of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for
international energy cooperation, Igor Yusufov, had been expected to
attend the event. A Kremlin spokesman told AFP in Moscow that he had
been forced to cancel his planned trip to Baku at the last minute due
to illness.
Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a declaration
committing some of his country’s vast Caspian oil reserves to
transport through the pipeline just prior to the ceremony extending
the BTC’s life expectancy past 2010, when Azeri oil production is
expected to slump.
“The East-West energy corridor plays an important security role in
the region and it’s clear that economic growth and stability would
not be possible without the export of oil,” Turkey’s President Ahmet
Necdetsezer said at the opening.
He said the pipeline would take pressure off Turkey’s tanker-clogged
Bosphorus Straits that link the Black Sea to the Mediterranean,
another major maritime transport route for oil.
Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili stressed the geopolitical
changes afoot in the region after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“After the fall of a big empire we want sources of hydrocarbons to be
protected and provide for stability of their transport,” he said.
The 1,770-kilometer-long (1,094-mile-) pipeline will transform the
Caucasus and Turkey into an energy bridge between the Caspian and the
rest of the world and has shifted geo-strategic alliances in the
Caucasus region and Central Asia.
But the presence of senior officials from the United States and other
countries at Wednesday’s ceremonies was tainted by a controversy as
Azeri authorities continued to hold opposition members detained in
connection with the pipeline’s opening.
Police badly beat and arrested scores of people attending a peaceful
rally last Saturday as part of a wider opposition crackdown.
Authorities justified their actions on grounds that the rally was
held too close to the pipeline opening ceremonies, a claim questioned
by Western officials.
Baku was the sight of some of the first industrially developed oil
fields in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.
The British oil giant BP holds a leading 30 percent stake in the
consortium running the pipeline. Other consortium members include
Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR, Amerada Hess, ConocoPhillips,
Eni, Inpex, Itochu, Statoil, Total, TPAO and Unocal.
SOCAR president Natik Aliyev called the pipeline, which is expected
to become a major competitor to traditional export routes for Caspian
oil that pass through Russia, the “realization” of a national dream
on Wednesday.
He said it “bridged the nations of the region.”
The Caspian region produces a light crude of high quality but has
suffered from its distance from the world’s major consumers — North
America, Europe, China and Japan.
The pipeline is to ship one million barrels of Caspian oil, roughly
one percent of global oil production, daily to Turkey’s Mediterranean
coast once it is fully up and running by the end of the year.
