ALMATY, Oct 6 (AFP) - Kazakhstan's dreams of petrodollar riches may be cut short by a devastating bottleneck in its creaking Soviet-era pipe system that must be resolved before oil can start reaching China and Russia, officials warn.
The Caspian Sea's Kashagan field -- considered by some estimates to be among the world's top five oil fields -- is likely to begin production in 2008, said Martin Ferstl, a representative for the Anglo-Dutch group Shell.
"When you start bringing these wells on you have an incredible increase in production very fast," said Ferstl, whose company is a partner in the field's development.
"You could well find a scenario where Russia and China are trying to attack this Kazakh oil and where's it going to go? This is what will take the next four years to sort out ... the government-to-government aspect of this whole pipeline business is enormous," said Ferstl.
Kazakhstan's oil fields could be producing between three and four million barrels of oil per day within the next few years, making this former Soviet republic a force in world markets, analysts have said.
But Kashagan -- owned by an ENI-led consortium that besides Shell also include Shell, ExxonMobil, BG, Total, ConocoPhillips and Inpex -- is one of three giant fields that face future transport headaches owing to Kazakhstan's landlocked status.
Kazakhstan has been making slow progress in negotiations over possible participation in a US-backed project, the Baku-Tbilisi-Cheyhan (BTC) pipeline, which is being built from Azerbaijan's side of the Caspian to Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
Meanwhile Russian officials have complained about continuous upgrading of another pipeline, the trans-Russia Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which will increase capacity but means that Moscow is seeing little return on its investment in the project.
Earlier this week, construction work started on a pipeline section being built by China and Kazakhstan that could eventually run 3,000-kilometres (620-miles) from the Caspian Sea to the Chinese border.
But industry players have doubts about the pipeline's viability for Kazakhstan, principally due to the vast distances involved and the presence of a single buyer at the Chinese end.
Kashagan, which will be exploited from more than 20 artificial islands, is estimated to contain 45 billion barrels (5.8 billion tonnes) of oil, of which between eight to 13 billion barrels are currently considered recoverable.