Word: bp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have surged through a pipeline running from Baku through Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Named the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC), the $4 billion pipeline is one of the world's longest and is operated by the British-American oil company BP, with partners that include U.S. oil companies Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Hess. By spring, about 1 million bbl. a day will move down the pipe, and BP could increase that soon after to about 1.5 million bbl. a day. A parallel BP pipeline opened last month to send hundreds of billions of cubic feet...
...years, the pipeline had to skirt war zones in the Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan, and in Georgia, which has been in a conflict with South Ossetian separatists. Then there were the engineering issues: the pipeline had to pass under about 1,500 rivers. At one point BP hired 400 archaeologists to sift through the mountain of ancient artifacts unearthed along the way. Equally daunting was the political wrangling: two of the three countries changed Presidents during construction, requiring lengthy renegotiations over the deal...
...Caspian's oil and natural gas reserves, which some estimates have put as large as 200 billion bbl. (vs. 260 billion in Saudi Arabia), could deliver economic independence to the South Caucasus region and energy independence to the West. "This is about diversifying energy supplies," says Michael Townshend, a BP executive who ran the project in Baku until last year. "It is not from the Middle East and it is not from Russia...
...power to dictate terms for much of Europe. In one power play, the Russians briefly blocked gas last winter to Ukraine, leaving millions freezing. In December, Putin threatened to do the same to Belarus unless it began paying Western-level gas prices. Belarus agreed. Infuriated that Azerbaijan's new BP-operated pipeline to the West bypasses Russia, Putin has said he intends to double gas prices for Azerbaijan, which in turn threatened to stop exporting its oil through the Russian-controlled section of the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline to the Black Sea. "We want to put an end to this!" says...
...extremely weak and not fully sovereign," says Greg Muttitt, co-director of Platform, a watchdog organization in London that monitors the oil and gas industries. "The U.S. has put a lot of effort into this." But it's not certain that U.S. or British majors like ExxonMobil or BP will be the first big benefactors. Both China and India signed exploration deals with Saddam before the war, which remain in effect...