Tag Archives: business

Azerbaijan’s President blames BP for declining energy production

OCT. 10 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – At a government meeting broadcast on TV, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev blamed BP for declining oil production from fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea.

Such a public and unequivocal rebuke is virtually unprecedented in Azerbaijan’s recent energy history and it will sting.

BP is the dominant foreign oil company operating in Azerbaijan. Other fields are due to come on stream in the next decade but at the moment the key operations are the Shah Deniz gas field and the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) fields.

Mr Aliyev said that “grave mistakes” by BP had triggered a 12% reduction in ACG’s oil production this year and cost Azerbaijan $8b in lost oil revenues over the past three years.

BP, which owns about 36% of the field, has not given a reason for the decrease in oil production but, in response, said it was committed to both ACG and working in Azerbaijan.

The start of production at ACG had been greeted with great excitement but anticipated production of 1m barrels of oil a day quickly evaporated.

Now, the challenge is to maintain output at a far more modest 700,000 barrels of oil a day and to appease the all-powerful Mr Aliyev.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)

Azerbaijan resumes gas supply to Turkey

OCT. 9 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – BP announced that gas supplies from the Shah Deniz field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea to Turkey had resumed after a blast on the South Caucasus pipeline disabled it on Oct. 4. CORRECTION: In last week’s bulletin, we mistakenly named the damaged gas pipeline as the Baku-Tbilsi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. BTC is, of course, an oil pipeline. Apologies.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 108, published on Oct. 12 2012)

Pipeline blast disables Azerbaijan’s gas pump

OCT. 4 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – An explosion disabled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline which pumps gas from the Shah Deniz fields in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea to Turkey, media reported. This is the second explosion in the Turkish part of the BTC pipeline, a route critical for European gas supplies, this year.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)

ConocoPhillips sells its Kazakh oil fields

OCT. 2 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – US energy company ConocoPhillips will sell its stake in the Kashagan oil field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan’s energy minister Sauat Mynbayev, told reporters. The sale gives the Kazakh government the chance to buy a larger stake in the giant oil field.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)

Kyrgyz PM pledges not to nationalise Kumtor

OCT. 1 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s new PM, Zhantoro Satibaldiyev, pledged not to nationalise the country’s biggest economic asset — the Kumtor gold mine. Toronto-based Centerra Gold owns Kumtor, which contributes about an eighth of Kyrgyzstan’s national GDP.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)

Kyrgyz police fires tear gas to potesters

OCT. 3 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz police fired tear gas in Bishkek to disperse about 2,000 people who were calling for the overthrow of the government after it pledged not to nationalise the Kumtor gold mine, media reported. About 200 people tried to climb over a fence surrounding the government’s headquarters in the worst violence in Bishkek since a revolution in 2010.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 107, published on Oct. 5 2012)

BP needs to invest more in Azerbaijani oil sector

SEP. 24 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – BP needs to invest billions to slow declining oil production at its fields in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, Reuters reported, quoting diplomats and oil executives. The article suggested it may not be commercially viable to pour the extra cash into the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli fields.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 106, published on Sep. 28 2012)

Kumtor re-starts in Kyrgyzstan

SEP. 21 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kumtor gold mine, Kyrgyzstan’s largest industrial operation, started production after a closure lasting seven weeks, media reported. Kumtor, owned by Toronto-based Centerra Gold, stopped production of gold in mid-July because of a lack of ore to process.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 106, published on Sep. 28 2012)

Turkmenistan’s Iranian imports rise

SEP. 24 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan’s imports from neighbouring Iran have increased four-fold since 2008 to $1.3b, the Iranian government news agency Fars reported, quoting Hamid Goozaliyan, the trade attaché at the Iranian embassy in Ashgabat. Iran has been pushing for better relations with Central Asia since the mid-2000s.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 106, published on Sep. 28 2012)

Business deals cast Uzbekistan into a bad light

SEP. 26 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prosecutors in Sweden have opened an investigation into alleged bribery and money laundering by TeliaSonera, a Swedish telecoms company with businesses across the world, linked to a deal in 2007 to buy a 3G licence in Uzbekistan, media reported.

In the 2007 deal, TeliaSonera bought the licence from a Gibraltar registered company called Takilant for $352m. The Swedish media has speculated that the real owners of Takilant may have had close links to Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan.

TeliaSonera, in which the Swedish government owns 37%, has denied the allegations. The media, though, reported that the company’s CEO, Lars Nyberg, has said he doesn’t know whether people other than the nominal owner of Talikant benefited from the deal or how it came to own the 3G licence in the first place. Swedish media focused on TeliaSonera’s role in the saga, but it also throws more light on how business is conducted in Uzbekistan. And it’s not pretty.

Russian mobile operator MTS is currently fighting allegations of tax avoidance in Uzbekistan and, separately, Swiss authorities have opened a money laundering investigation into four unnamed Uzbek citizens. Corruption allegations over the TeliaSonera/Takilant deal add to this picture.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 106, published on Sep. 28 2012)