After long planning to diversify its oil export routes away from Russian pathways, Kazakhstan’s government is looking to revive a pipeline project that seemed to have been shelved. Next year, in fact, construction could start on the Yeskene-Kuryk pipeline, which would connect oil producing areas in the west of the country to the port of Kuryk, on the Caspian shore.
The idea to revive the Yeskene-Kuryk pipeline came about in July 2022, as the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) was suffering disruptions. The CPC transports around 80 percent of Kazakhstan’s oil exports through Russia to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
After Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Kazakhstan-based producers, which include some of the world’s largest oil companies, feared that the CPC would become a potential target of Western sanctions aimed to hinder Russia’s war effort.
A number of disruptions, some weather-related, some court-ordered, and some arguably politically-motivated, led Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to instruct state-owned oil company Kazmunaigas to revamp the 739-km pipeline from Yeskene to Kuryk.
The goal is twofold. First, it would diversify export routes, allowing increasing volumes of Kazakhstan’s crude to avoid transiting through Russian territory. Second, it would spearhead the development of the Kuryk port, which had been in the cards for at least a decade, but has not yet seen the rapid development the authorities were hoping for.
Kazmunaigas would have to invest around $1.5 billion to build the pipeline, a sum equivalent to two-thirds of last year’s net profit.
Yeskene is a small village near Atyrau, the country’s so-called oil capital. In the mid-2000s, it was indicated as a potential hub for the construction of an additional oil and gas processing facility, after the operators of the Kashagan offshore project selected the nearby town of Karabatan to build their massive Bolashak plant.
At the time, however, media commentaries said the choice of Yeskene would entail potential dangers to the local wildlife, especially in the event of industrial accidents or pipeline leakage. The proximity to the Bolashak plant would “increase the probability of negative industrial impact on the surrounding area,” a rather neutral report on industrial plans said.
In 2012, just before the North Caspian Operating Consortium (NCOC) made its first attempt to kick-start production at Kashagan, then-Minister of Energy Sauat Mynbayev said that “the implementation of the second phase of Kashagan will require the construction of the Yeskene-Kuryk pipeline.”
The same year, Kazmunaigas paid for the resettlement of dozens of families from the village of Yeskene to the city of Atyrau as work at the nearby oil fields wound down and local residents struggled to find jobs.
In 2021, some of the residents who remained in Yeskene demanded resettlement because of the negative effects the Bolashak plant on their health. At a press conference, however, Makhambet Dosmukhambetov, the regional governor, said a resettlement could not be paid for by public funds.
Now, while the CPC is still considered the most reliable and cost-effective route for Kazakhstan’s oil exports, the Ministry of Energy outlined oversized plans to diversify its foreign trade strategy.
“We are working out the issue of the construction of the Yeskene-Kuryk oil pipeline. We estimate its capacity at 20-30 million tons per year,” Minister Almasadam Satkaliyev said on November 25.
Satkaliyev also said the government plans to beef up exports via the Druzhba pipeline (also through Russia) to Germany to 1.4 million tons per year, a 40 percent increase compared to last year. Kazakhstan also plans to increase exports via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) route.
“In 2024, we plan to supply 1.5 million tons of Kazakh oil through [the BTC]. We are studying the possibility to increase supplies along this route to 20 million tons per year,” Satkaliyev said.
For reference, Kazakhstan pumps 55.4 million tons of oil annually via the CPC, an amount that dwarfs all other routes.
The only possible way for Kazakhstan to pump 13 times more oil via the BTC would be to both build the Yeskene-Kuryk pipeline, essentially bringing Kashagan oil to the Caspian shore, and then to significantly grow its fleet of tankers, which would move oil to Azerbaijan’s capital and then onward to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Yet, as argued by energy analyst Askar Ismailov in his Telegram channel, “Transporting such large volumes of oil by tanker across the Caspian Sea does not appear commercially viable.”
Besides economic concerns, Kazakhstan is balancing the potential political consequences of a prolonged war in Ukraine on the status of the CPC as a sanctions-exempt infrastructure.