New Europe: CNPC May Join the Major Kazakhstan’s Karachaganak Project

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is an active participant in many oil and gas projects in Central Asia, mainly in the hydrocarbon rich Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

Unlike Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where there were no visible obstacles to Chinese companies’ entering the gas projects, in Kazakhstan, every new oil and gas contract with China was met with a surge of discontent from the locals.

That can be explained by a number of reasons. First, the local population still has a folk memory of a constant fight for its territory against China in the past centuries.

Second, with a population of just 17 million, Kazakhs have always been somewhat wary of their two-billion-people neighbour, in spite of the recent active cooperation between the two countries.

That said, the external circumstances dictate that this oil-and-gas-rich Central Asian republic forget its phobias in the face of the world financial crisis, plummeting oil process, and the necessity to go even deeper into the earth to extract those difficult hydrocarbons. MORE