Are there oil fields in afghanistan

Oil and gas are not the reason the US has attacked Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has long had a key place in US plans to secure control of the vast but landlocked oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.

In the case of the great natural gas and oil fields of Turkmenistan, immediately north of Afghanistan, the US government has for a decade strongly supported plans by US-led business groups for both an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Arabian sea via Afghanistan and a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Such pipelines would serve important US interests in a number of ways: Drawing the Central Asian oil states away from the Russian sphere of influence and establishing the foundation for a strong US position Thwarting the development of Iranian regional influence by limiting Turkmenistan-Iranian gas links and thwarting a plan for a Turkmenistan-Iran oil pipeline to the Arabian Sea. The Taliban, which is committed to a particularly primitive vision of Sunni Islam, had the added advantage for the US of being deeply hostile to Shia Muslims in neighboring Iran as well as within Afghanistan.

A crucial condition for building the pipelines is political stability in Afghanistan, and for a time the US believed the Taliban could provide just that. Certainly Iran believed that the US was behind Pakistani and Saudi support for the Taliban as part of a long-term plan to contain Iran. The key to Central Asian politics is economic development in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, all of which are amongst the poorest parts of the former Soviet Union.

Most are authoritarian dictatorships of the most dismal kind. For the past ten years the US has been wooing the governments of these countries, and opening the doors for profitable investment by US companies. If you read the trade newspapers and websites of the world oil industry, words like "fabulous", "huge", "enormous" flow across the pages describing the Caspian Sea Basin gas and oil fields. But more importantly, these words go together with "undeveloped", "isolated" and "politically unstable".

There are billions of dollars to be made there, but the possibility of realizing these fabulous profits hinges on one crucial issue: how is the gas and oil to get to its potential markets?

While the countries of Central Asia may be floating on a sea of hydrocarbon, they are far from both actual seas and centres of industry. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terms of trade became very sharp.

In the s the ex-Soviet buyers of Caspian hydrocarbons could no longer afford to pay world prices. And Gazprom, the old Soviet oil company that owned the pipelines, was selling its own oil in competition with that of the Caspian republics.

The ex-Soviet Russian pipeline network itself is past its use-by date, having been sloppily built with out-of-date technology, and itself needs billions of dollars simply to renovate it. A small number of new pipelines have been built, but many more are, as they say, in the pipeline. But all have costs in the billions, and each of the possible routes from the Caspian Sea Basin — west, south, southeast and east — has very serious political difficulties.

If Afghan political turmoil could be ended, there are literally billions of dollars to be made by US and Japanese companies, by the Turkmenistan, Afghan and Pakistani governments, and one key element of US planning for Central Asian regional hegemony would be achieved. The Northern Route: from the Caspian through Russia An existing Russian pipeline to the huge oil terminal on the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk could be linked to the new fields in Azerbaijan and later Kazakhstan.

A plan for this "Northern Route" involving the Caspian Sea Pipeline Consortium of Russian and foreign corporations is pressing ahead, but faces several severe obstacles. The first is the war in Chechnya, through which the first phase of this pipeline passes. The second is that the US is opposed to it for precisely the reasons that Russia likes it: it would be good for Russia. The Western Route 2 : via Georgia to Turkey In late September of this year, Azerbaijan and Georgia agreed on terms for passage rights across Georgia of a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey to start exports in This would fit with EU planning to create a gas grid stretching from the Caspian to the Atlantic.

Georgia is still politically unstable, but more importantly, this route is not especially suitable for the states to the east of the Caspian Sea — Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Anything involving the Caspian Sea itself is regarded as extremely sensitive by oil companies because in the mess left by the break-up of the Soviet Union, there is no accepted legal framework for governing the Caspian Sea itself.

Download the France 24 app. The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore. ON TV. On social media. Who are we? Fight the Fake. Daily newsletter Receive essential international news every morning Subscribe. World , Economy , Asia - Pacific 'Afghanistan starts gas extraction after 4 decades' Official says , cubic meters being extracted from new field discovered in northern province Shadi Khan Saif KABUL, Afghanistan In a landmark development, Afghanistan has started extracting gas from a newly discovered field in northern Jawzjan province, officials confirmed on Thursday.

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