BAKU - Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said Tuesday that his oil-rich former Soviet republic in Central Asia would pump large amounts of its crude through a four-billion-dollar US-backed pipeline to be inaugurated here Wednesday.
"For us this route will be one of the main ways to supply world markets," Nazarbayev said at ceremony where he signed a raft of bilateral agreements with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a US-backed energy initiative, will transform the Caucasus and Turkey into an energy bridge between the Caspian and the rest of the world.
But Kazakhstan`s participation in the project has until now remained under question as it navigated choppy diplomatic waters between Washington and Moscow.
The BTC pipeline is expected to go into full operation six months from now and become a major competitor to traditional export routes for Caspian oil that pass through Russia.
Nazarbayev joked that the pipeline should be renamed Aktau-Tbilisi-Ceyhan after Kazakhstan`s Caspian port city, Aktau. He added however that Kazakhstan would keep open other options for exporting its oil, production of which is expected to reach 150 million tons a year in 2015.
Another pipeline targeting growing Chinese energy demand will be opened as early as December, Nazarbayev said and "there is the possible variant of exporting oil through Iran in the future," he added.
But Kazakhstan`s new commitment to the BTC pipeline is viewed as a victory for US policy-makers who have touted the route as way of reducing the West`s dependence on fuel supplies from the volatile Middle East.
Washington`s senior State Department advisor for Eurasia in the Bureau of European Affairs, Steven Mann, expressed his "strong support" for an agreement between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan at a press conference in Baku on Tuesday.
He said it was "in the logic of energy development" and "develops new outlines, new drafts from East to West," suggesting it severed old dependencies on Russia to the north.
Georgia`s President Mikhail Saakashvili -- who`s small Caucasus nation depends on Moscow for everything from electric power to gas supplies -- said at a meeting with Aliyev on Tuesday that the BTC and a parallel gas pipeline that goes online in 2006, will cut dependencies in the region.
"This project is very important to us... it makes the whole region, including Georgia, energy-independent," Saakashvili said.
But US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who will attend the opening ceremony in Azerbaijan on Wednesday, downplayed the ill-effects for Russia as he spoke to journalists in Moscow.
Asked if the BTC was a US-led effort to cut Russia out of the regional energy picture, Bodman responded: "That`s certainly not how we view it.
"We view this as a significant step forward in the energy security of that region."
He said the primary purpose of the new BTC pipeline was to increase supply of oil to world markets.
The 1,770 kilometer-long (1,094-mile) pipeline is to ship one million barrels of Caspian oil to Turkey`s Mediterranean coast daily once it is fully up and running by the end of the year.
British oil giant BP holds a 30 percent stake in the consortium running the pipeline. Other consortium members include Azerbaijan`s state oil company SOCAR, Amerada Hess, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Inpex, Itochu, Statoil, Total, TPAO and Unocal.
The Caspian region produces a light crude of high quality but has suffered from its distance from the world`s major consumers -- North America, Europe, China and Japan.
Kazakhstan`s president was expected to sign a final agreement on his country`s participation in the pipeline the day of the opening ceremony.
05/24/2005 15:37 GMT