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CBSNews: Caspian region will remain a potential source of international crisis and conflict

11 January 2012 09:55 (UTC +04:00)

In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance to the key geographical flashpoints in our resource-constrained worldâ€, said CBSNewsâ€™ â€œWar Watch 2012: Welcome to a Very Edgy Worldâ€ by Michael Klare. The author named the regions, â€œwhere a single incident at an energy â€œchokepointâ€ could set a region aflame, provoking bloody encounters, boosting oil prices, and putting the global economy at riskâ€. â€œIn the new Geo-Energy Era, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Caspian Basin hardly stand alone as potential energy flashpointsâ€, said the author.

â€œAccording to energy giant BP, the Caspian area harbors as much as 48 billion barrels of oil (mostly buried in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) and 449 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (with the largest supply in Turkmenistan). This puts the region ahead of North and South America in total gas reserves and Asia in oil reserves. But producing all this energy and delivering it to foreign markets will be a monumental task. The regionâ€™s energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate and the Caspian itself provides no maritime outlet to other seas, so all that oil and gas must travel by pipeline or railâ€, said Klare.

â€œRussia, long the dominant power in the region, is pursuing control over the transportation routes by which Caspian oil and gas will reach marketsâ€, said the author and added: â€œWashington sought to thwart these efforts by sponsoring the construction of alternative pipelines that avoid Russian territory, crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the Mediterranean (notably the BTC, or Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), while Beijing is building its own pipelines linking the Caspian area to western Chinaâ€.

â€œGiven the magnitude of the Caspianâ€™s oil and gas reserves, many energy firms are planning new production operations in the region, along with the pipelines needed to bring the oil and gas to market. The European Union, for example, hopes to build a new natural gas pipeline called Nabucco from Azerbaijan through Turkey to Austria. Russia has proposed a competing conduit called South Stream. All of these efforts involve the geopolitical interests of major powers, ensuring that the Caspian region will remain a potential source of international crisis and conflictâ€.