Are there oil reserves in afghanistan

Underexplored Basin "The Amy Daria Basin is a large geological province 57, km2 in Afghanistan alone, the equivalent of approximately 10 North Sea Quadrants or more than US Gulf of Mexico blocks , with several prolific petroleum producing areas and many recent world class gas discoveries in adjacent Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan," says Geir Ytreland.

Horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracturing technologies that have enabled companies to unlock large amounts of gas from shaley source rocks are now targeting similar rocks for oil and gas liquids. Send us feedback Submit feedback. Mailing list Sign up. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. You can configure cookie settings using the link on this message. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the GEO ExPro website.

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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 The ex-Soviet Russian pipeline network itself is past its use-by date, having been sloppily built with out-of-date technology, and itself needs billions of dollars simply to renovate it.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.