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Gold/Mining/Energy : Steppe Gold (SPE:V) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brian krause who wrote (704)	3/5/1998 8:21:00 PM
From: John Menzies	Respond to of 1248

Just saw this and it is relevane to previous comments on the Caspian Basin. The issues are being addressed and resolved. BAKU, March 3 (AFP) - An international consortium with rights to billions of dollars of Caspian Sea oil said on Tuesday it had resolved a customs dispute with the Russian authorities and had pumped its first consignment of "early" oil across the Azerbaijan-Russian border. The Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), a consortium of 12 international oil companies, said 80,000 tonnes of crude had begun to flow through the metering station near the Azerbaijani town of Shirvanovka on Saturday. The export pipeline from Baku terminates in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, where the crude will be loaded onto tankers and shipped to western markets. In 1995 the AIOC secured rights to develop three offshore fields with estimated reserves of 540 million tonnes in Azerbaijan's sector of the Caspian Sea. "The AIOC announces that on February 28, 1998, the first oil which the company began to produce from the Chirag-1 platform on November 7 reached and crossed the Russian-Azerbaijani border," the consortium said. Although the consortium insisted that the "early" oil had in no way been delayed, the shipment has been caught in a dispute between the AIOC and the Russian authorities over a demand for additional customs duties, levied by the Russian state pipeline operator Transneft. Russian authorities had insisted that the AIOC pay 0.015 percent of the value of the oil on the consignment transported across the Russian portion of the pipeline, before it would be allowed to pass through Novorossiisk. Transneft pointed to the fact that none of the AIOC's members were registered companies in Azerbaijan, but rather registered offshore, and therefore subject to extra duties. The AIOC for its part insisted that according to an inter-governmental agreement signed by Russia and Azerbaijan in January 1996, the consortium was exempt from paying any extra fees on oil transported across Russia. "The matter was settled according to the terms of the inter-governmental agreement, whereby the AIOC will pay 15.67 dollars per tonne to Transneft at the end of the shipping period. That is all we will pay," said AIOC spokeswoman Tamam Bayatly. Prior to the customs dispute, the AIOC already pumped a first consignment of 120,000 tons of oil for the Azerbaijani state oil company (SOCAR) through the 1,411-kilometre (875 miles) Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline. No additional customs duties were levied on that consignment. The 80,000 tons of AIOC crude now heading for Novorossiisk will be shipped from the Russian port by March 20, Bayatly added. The AIOC and the Azerbaijani government signed an eight-billion-dollar so-called "contract of the century" in September 1995, agreeing to share production at the three offshore fields. British Petroleum and US oil giant Amoco are the chief stakeholders in the consortium, which also includes SOCAR, Russia's Lukoil, Norway's Statoil, and US companies Exxon, Unocal and Pennzoil. The AIOC is aiming to pump 1.5 million tons of oil through Novorossiisk this year, with a total of five million tons to be exported annually by 2002 through the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline and another pipeline crossing Georgia to the south, which is yet to be completed. Both Azerbaijan and the United States favour the trans-Georgia route for the larger quantities of oil expected from the Caspian fields in the next century. -=-=- Want to tell us what you think about the ClariNews? Please feel free to <<email us your comments>> <comments@clari.net>.