Word: gas
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...just Mirza and his family. This Muslim republic, directly north of Iran and tucked into the southwest corner of the vast former Soviet empire, is suddenly a central player in one of the West's most distressing problems: how the U.S. and Europe will secure enough oil and gas to power cities, factories, airplanes and cars--in short, how to keep our entire modern lives afloat. Since last June, hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day have surged through a pipeline running from Baku through Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Named...
...countries and the global oil companies, the benefits are so compelling that they trump politics and old ethnic rivalries. The 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...
...cold war as history--until you land in Baku. This is the front line of a new East-West contest, one that is as consequential as the nuclear-weapons face-off of the past: the battle for energy supplies among countries heavily dependent on imported oil and gas, which include the U.S. and the E.U., plus the rocketing economies of China and India. That necessity is a powerful weapon in this new battle. Shortly before Christmas, Russian President Vladimir Putin forced Royal Dutch Shell to cede control of Sakhalin II, the world's biggest oil and gas project...
That's given Russia immense 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...
...rest of Asia are competing for new sources. The Caspian, which is largely unexplored, probably accounts for 7% of the world's oil reserves, and the oil flowing through the new West-bound pipeline still represents a mere 1% of global supply. But ultimately some of the gas from Khazakstan and Turkmenistan's much larger natural-gas fields across the Caspian from Baku could flow through BP's pipelines, turning to the West rather than to Asia. "The pipeline is changing the strategic map in a very major way," says a senior State Department official...