Azerbaijan upstream activities in oil and gas are moving into Central Asia, with two deals recently signed, the last just a few days ago, to build oil refineries in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. New Azerbaijan upstream activities in Central Asia An … Continue reading →
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq has announced a plan to construct an oil pipeline to Turkey with a volume of 1 million barrels per day (bpd), move hinting at tectonic shifts in the geo-economics and associated geopolitics … Continue reading →
The president of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), Rovnag Abdullaev, has announced that the US$8 billion-plus Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline may be expanded four-fold from its initially planned volume of 8-16 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) to as … Continue reading →
Keynote speech to the Seventh Annual Eurasian Pipelines Colloquium, “Geo-Eco Politics, Eurasian Energy, and (elusive) Transparency,” School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, 16 April 2012. Thank you. I have been asked to make some remarks on the theme … Continue reading →
The debate over Iran and its relations with the international community tends to gloss over how Iran threatens Azerbaijan sovereignty. It has taken on such a character that egregious errors of fact and logic cannot be allowed to stand, especially … Continue reading →
The French energy major Total this weekend announced yet another major natural gas discovery in the Caspian Sea offshore from Azerbaijan. The Absheron block is located to the east of the better-known Shah Deniz field (in which Total has a … Continue reading →
South Korea President Lee Myung-bak returned home last week from a tour of Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that helped to project South Korea investment and its foreign economic diplomacy across Inner and Central Asia while significantly expanding Seoul’s ties with … Continue reading →
India Uzbekistan relations reached a new level and further the former’s economic and strategic penetration in Central Asia with the visit to New Delhi last week of Uzbekistan’s President Islom Karimov, who signed an agreement that could lead to India’s … Continue reading →
The trip this past week of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should be seen in light of the possible emergence of an India Kazakhstan China geo-economic triangle, similar in nature to the one I pointed out seven years ago, long before … Continue reading →
The changing geo-economic environment around the Central Asian and South Caucasus hydrocarbon energy producers is reflected in a public flip-flop by a major European Union official this week. At a news conference in Berlin, European Union Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, … Continue reading →