Trouble on the steppe
Major new investment in Tengiz cannot mask deeper problems in Kazakhstan
AS a vote of confidence in the Kazakh oil sector it is hard to beat. On 5 July, Chevron and its partners in the 0.6m-barrel-a-day Tengiz project in the Caspian sea said they would spend another $36.8bn to add another 260,000 b/d of output from the field by 2022. Forget the oil-price slump, the project is one of the largest to be sanctioned in the past 10 years. After years of troubled progress and mixed deadlines at Kazakhstan's other major oil project, Kashagan, the Tengiz news was especially welcome in Astana. Yet for all the fanfare around the Tengiz announcement, Kazakhstan is in a state of flux, and its politics dangerous. The central Asian state, which holds the world's eleventh la
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