Forecasters are confident that at full production, Kashagan will help double Kazakhstan's output before 2020.
Shell, for one, may want to make up for its Sakhalin-2 losses by taking control of Kashagan.
An agreement was reached in the row about how best to develop the giant Kashagan oilfield .
"The Kashagan project has been designed as a zero-discharge production facility, " said Pierre Offant, NCOC chairman managing director.
The only people who may really know are those in the companies actually doing the drilling at Kashagan.
Kashagan initially was meant to be running by 2007, but the consortium members underestimated the difficulty of developing the field.
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Kashagan has been a classic case of what can go wrong when you have too many cooks in the kitchen.
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Further North, Exxon is ensconced (a bit too deeply) in Kazakhstan with Kashagan and has even been tentatively sniffing in Turkmenistan.
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While Rome-based ENI may not have the name recognition of its leading competitors, its role in developing Kashagan will certainly change that.
That should be enough to handle production from an even bigger Kazakh field, Kashagan, which is slated to come on line in 2008.
The Kashagan consortium contains many large and skilled firms, but few energy firms have the expertise needed for a project as difficult as Kashagan.
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Until a replacement can be found, Kashagan will remain on hold.
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Scaroni is betting that Kashagan will transform Eni into one of the best operators of big, highly complex oil and gas fields--and thereby impress the Kremlin.
This arrangement can continue indefinitely, but without Kashagan, Kazakhstan cannot supply the planned 1.2 million barrels for the line to China, let alone fully diversify its exports.
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The ambitions of ONGC-Videsh in Kashagan may yet be blocked.
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The Tengiz problem is a mere puddle next to the troubles at Kashagan in the remote North Caspian Sea, the world's largest oilfield discovery in the last three decades.
There's no doubt that Eni is fretting about Kashagan, touted as the most important oil discovery of the last three decades, with up to 13 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Recently, Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov warned the Kashagan consortium members that if they do not get costs under control and the project back on a proper timeline, the project will be frozen.
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Barcelo indicated that the Kashagan deal should help ENI close the valuation gap with its peers, but if there are problems and the gap doesn't close, then the company will become a prime takeover target.
Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, told Elizabeth Jones, America's envoy to the Caspian, last week that the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline would provide an export route for early oil from Kashagan, where production is due to start in 2005.
The Kazakh government announced Monday that it was suspending operations at its Kashagan oilfield for three months because Eni, the leader of a group of oil companies including ExxonMobil, Total, Royal Dutch Shell and CononoPhillips, which have stakes in the offshore project, had violated environmental regulations.
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