Caspian Sea Energy Data, Statistics and Analysis

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Caspian Sea

	Background
The Caspian Sea region, including the Sea and the states surrounding it, is important to world energy markets because of its potential to become a major oil and natural gas exporter over the next decade.	The Caspian Sea region has become a central focal point for untapped oil and natural gas resources from the southern portion of the former Soviet Union. Beginning in May 2005, oil from the southern sections of the Caspian Sea began pumping through a new pipeline (built by a BP-led consortium) to the Turkish seaport of Ceyhan. The 8-year effort of Western capital, technology, and diplomacy had aimed to decrease reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Although oil reserve growth in the Caspian region has not met levels that had been expected in the 1990s, European countries are paying special attention to the natural gas resources that could lie beneath the Sea as a way to diversify their sources of gas imports. This report defines the Caspian Sea as an area including the Sea's littoral states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, as well as parts of Russia and Iran. Uzbekistan, although not a littoral state, is the region's largest natural gas producer and is therefore included in the region for the purposes of this analysis.
However, several factors threaten to complicate the region's potential, including a lack of adequate export infrastructure, disagreement over new export routes, and border disputes between the littoral states.	At the moment, the countries of the Caspian Sea region are relatively minor world oil and natural gas producers, struggling with difficult economic and political transitions. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the countries’ economies languished as regional trade collapsed. In the last couple years, GDP levels in the primary oil and natural gas producing countries have surpassed levels before independence. Moreover, in the region’s two biggest oil producers, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, 46 percent and 26 percent of the populations, respectively, lived below the poverty line in 2005. Improving these conditions depends, in large part, on the successful development of the region's oil and natural gas potential.