Stakeholders representing eight shareholder companies involved in Kazakhstan’s major oil projects are conducting a feasibility study on expanding oil exports westward through the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan. The timing of this matters. Kazakhstan currently sends more than 80 percent of its crude exports through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a more than 1,500 km-long pipeline connecting the major oil fields of western Kazakhstan with a terminal near Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Rus
