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Global Manipulators Move Beyond Petroleum The Saudis have a saying “My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son rides in a jet airplane – his son will ride a camel.” In July this year BP Amoco, the world’s second largest oil company, announced it had chosen a flower as its new emblem in a dramatic upheaval of the oil multinational’s global brand. Unveiling the new emblem, Sir John Browne, BP chief executive, suggested that “BP” be read not as British Petroleum, but as “Beyond Petroleum”. The new green and yellow floral sunburst design distances BP from its...

The global trade in legal caviar has been stopped by the United Nations, leaving gourmands gasping and conservationists cheering. "It's not good news. . . . I have clients who don't care about the price, they need legal caviar," said Mark Omidi, owner of the Toronto-based importer Caviar Centre. "It's the most prestigious commodity." Alarmed by the plunging number of sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, a UN agency dedicated to preserving endangered species has put the onus on wild-caviar exporting nations to prove that their conservation methods can protect the fish stocks. In the meantime, the Convention on International Trade...

The worldwide trade in caviar and other products that come from the wild sturgeon has been banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. A spokesman said the decision was imposed for scientific reasons connected to dwindling stocks of sturgeon, and to bring an end to illegal poaching in the Caspian Sea. Every year the organisation approves fishing quotas for sturgeon proposed by nations from the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Danube regions. Now it is asking for confirmation about stocks of the fish before it can agree to new catches, saying exporting countries should adopt a...

Russia is intensifying efforts to sell weapons to Iran while such sales remain legal amid mounting pressure on the Islamic state over its controversial nuclear program, the daily Kommersant said on Monday. Moscow “has stepped up military-technological cooperation with Tehran,” the business daily said, citing an unidentified source. It said top officials within Russia’s military-industrial complex decided to concentrate on arms sales to Tehran for two reasons. “Firstly, as many weapons as possible must be sold to Iran before an international embargo against this country comes into force.” Secondly, should the United States decide to go to war in Iran,...

TBILISI (AFP) - A top US official warned that privatisation of Georgia's main gas pipeline, which can thus fall into the Russian gas giant Gazprom's hands, could affect pipeline projects that link the resource-rich Caspian region to the West through Georgia. The United States had worked for Georgia's energy independence for years and "categorically oppose any action that would impair this process," Stephen Mann, US presidential advisor on the Caspian region, told the 24 Saati newspaper. In case the main pipeline was sold to Gazprom, "it would hinder the realisation of the Shah-Deniz project" that would link Azerbaijan's massive Shah-Deniz...

SOFIA, Bulgaria -- Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia gave political support on Tuesday to a $1.2 billion private trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will allow Russian and Caspian crude to avoid congested Turkish waters, officials said. Representatives from the three small Balkan states signed a declaration giving the green light to the U.S.-registered Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corp., AMBO, to launch the 912-kilometer pipeline between Bulgaria's Black Sea port of Burgas and Vlore, on Albania's Adriatic coast. "This is one of the most important infrastructure projects for regional, EU, and Euro-Atlantic integration for the western Balkans," Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano told...

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in Iran: The Invisible Revolution. During the U.S. presidential campaign, debate over Iran policy received unprecedented attention. The reasons are multifold. With Iran on the verge of developing both nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile capability, Washington policymakers can no longer ignore the Iranian threat, especially when confidants of Supreme Leader Ali Khomenei lead televised chants of "American will be annihilated," as Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati did last June. American concern over a nuclear Iran is multifold. The danger is not necessarily that Iran would conduct a nuclear first strike, although former president Ali Akbar...

...[T]he governments of Britain, France and Germany cut a deal with Iran whereby the Islamic Republic agreed to a temporary suspension of its nuclear-weapons programs. Yet within hours, evidence began piling up that Tehran was already in breach. What does this mean for the Bush Administration? We'll get to that in a moment, but first let's be clear on what this says about Iran's purposes, and about Europe's. ...[T]his latest agreement rehashes a similar deal reached by the same parties in October 2003. In both cases, Iran promised not to seek nuclear weapons and pledged full cooperation with the International...

No description (TRJ) E-Mail this article Comments to Editor Discussion Forum Printer-Friendly Advertisement For a decade Washington has been backing the Turkish and Azerbaijan governments to steer the export of Caspian region crude oil away from Russia. Russia's newest riposte has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, and open up the shortest, cheapest, and most lucrative oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian to Iran. The economics of the southward route are the latest blow for the Bush Administration, as it tries to redraw the geography of the Caucasus on an anti-Russian map. But for...

Russian oil major LUKoil announced reserves in Russia's sector of the Caspian Sea may compose total 33 billion barrels of oil equivalent. LUKoil vice president Anatoly Novikov said the company had discovered five offshore fields in the sector of the Caspian Sea in recent years and planned to start producing by 2008. LUKoil, which has the world's second biggest oil reserves among private oil majors after U.S. major ExxonMobil, has in the past delivered conflicting estimates of its Caspian fields. The firm has said the majority of fields contained gas, which is very difficult to ship out from the land-locked...

http://jamestown.org THE DRAGON'S DRIVE FOR CASPIAN OILhttp://jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=395&issue_id=2952&article_id=236701 By John C.k. Daly China 's insatiable energy thirst is causing it to undertake a global search for energy supplies to sustain its booming economy. Beijing has injected itself into the complex Caspian chess match to ensure itself as large a share as possible of resources being developed there. This complex political and economic maneuvering forces China to deal with the Caspian's five riparian states - Russia , Azerbaijan , Iran , Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan . Analysts estimate that within ten to fifteen years China will consume as much oil as the U.S....

Signaling once again its unhappiness about a U.S.-backed pipeline being built to take Caspian oil to the Mediterranean via Georgia and Turkey, Russia has insisted that the project is not economically viable. Moscow's special Caspian envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Kalyuzhny, told reporters in the capital that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project was "excessively politicized" and economically "problematic." The BTC, which is half-completed, aims by 2005 to carry crude from Caspian oilfields in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan some 1,760 kilometers to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Russia opposes the plan because the new route will bypass Russia, thus denying it transit...

Foreign secretary Jack Straw said today that Britain saw Kazakhstan as its strategic partner in Central Asia, and praised the investment climate in the former Soviet republic. Straw met with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev in the capital, Astana, and discussed co-operation in energy, environmental protection and defence. “The purpose of my visit is to show the importance the United Kingdom attaches to the relationship that we have with Kazakhstan, to emphasise Kazakhstan’s importance in the region,” Straw said after the talks. Straw also said British business people had great interest in Kazakhstan. He said he...

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- A crucial plank of U.S. policy in the oil-rich Caspian region settles into place today as a wide range of commercial banks and international financial institutions sign up to finance the first major non- Russian oil-export pipeline from an area of the former Soviet Union, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported. After a steady drumbeat of loan approvals valued at $600 million from U.S., European and Japanese multilateral lenders and state export-credit institutions, 15 commercial banks on Friday signed their agreement to raise an additional $1 billion toward the project's $3.6 billion total cost. The major investors in...

CARACAS -- Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev said last week to the Interfax news agency and Izvestia Daily that the five Caspian Sea nations should united to create an OPEC like oil organization to compete with the OPEC consortium and to support oil prices, reported news agencies Monday. "International experts say that the Arab countries and OPEC are nervous not only about the scale of Caspian oil resources, but also the fact that Caspian states are not part of the cartel," Nazarbayev told the Interfax news agency and the Izvestia daily in an interview published Monday, reported AFP and Reuters. "Caspian...

"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the beloved fantasy novel by C.S. Lewis, will be made into a film in New Zealand, a newspaper reported Friday. New Zealander Andrew Adamson, best known for the Oscar-winning animated feature "Shrek," will direct the film and Walden Media will produce it. "We are extremely happy and excited to be starting work on the film in New Zealand," Wellington's Dominion Post Newspaper quoted Adamson as saying. The movie is expected to be the first of five films based on Lewis' seven Chronicles of Narnia books, to which Walden holds the film rights. Director...

Georgia, before the Soviet Union absorbed it, owed its sovereignty indirectly to protection from the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. However, Turkey largely sat out events leading up to Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze’s November 23 resignation. Now that Russia is pressuring Georgia’s interim government though, Turkey is stepping up diplomatic activity in Georgia to offset Russia’s potential gains in influence. On December 3, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer called Georgian interim President Nino Burjanadze to pledge Turkey’s continuing support for Georgia, the spokesman of the president’s office told the Turkish media. According to Sezer’s spokesman, the president stressed that protecting Georgia’s independence...

Wednesday December 3, 10:24 AM US defense chief to visit strategic south Caucasus region BAKU (AFP) - Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was heading for the south Caucasus, a region of strategic importance for the United States but where regional superpowers Russia and Iran are also jealously guarding their own interests. The Pentagon has not announced the visit but local officials confirmed Rumsfeld is due to fly in to Azerbaijan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea, for talks with President Ilham Aliyev and Defence Minister Safar Abbiyev. Analysts have said one subject likely to figure in those talks...

BANDAR-E ANZALI, Iran (Reuters) - Caviar fishermen know full well that the tussle with an irate, half-tonne sturgeon can pitch one of their fragile skiffs into the icy, waves of the Caspian -- most have lost friends that way. Generation after generation still brave the elements to harvest the salty delicacy for which aficionados will pay $2,000 (1,182 pounds) a kilo (2.2 lb). But the fishermen on the windswept beach at Bandar-e Anzali fear illegal fishing and oil pollution mean they could be the last to scour the Caspian for its "black gold". Aziz Rezaniaz, 44, has spent his life...

LONDON - Critics of a U.S.-backed plan to build a pipeline transporting Caspian Sea oil to Western consumers are urging the World Bank (news - web sites)'s private investment arm to delay a decision on whether to help finance the $3.6 billion project. Environmentalists and human rights groups contend the pipeline, which would carry crude from Azerbaijan to Turkey's coast, endangers villages and wildlife in its path, and could spark conflict in a region already seething with ethnic tensions. The International Finance Corp., the World Bank's Washington-based private investment arm, was to have made a decision this week on lending...