Most Central Asian oil is believed to reside in the Kashagan field, under the Caspian Sea itself, a body of water bordered by Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. The Soviet Union controlled the sea from the 1920s on, but there has never been any treaty dividing up ownership -- today, all five countries surrounding the sea have staked competing claims on the water and to what lies beneath. In the decade following the dissolution of the USSR, the sea went from an "international footnote," in the words of one law review article, to "a tangled international dispute with a multi-billion dollar stake."
Ironing out the dispute won't just be difficult; it could be impossible, says John Voll, an Islamic history and international affairs professor at Georgetown University.
"Caspian oil can cause a lot of problems," he says, noting that a war between Azerbaijan and Iran could easily erupt over the Caspian, since both countries have been on bad terms since the 19th century. "It's not the amount that matters; it's the fact that it's being pulled in so many directions."
"People once thought the Caspian would be a more stable region than the Middle East, but that hasn't proven to be the case," says Amy Jaffe, senior energy advisor at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
And even if jurisdictional issues were settled, getting oil rigs and other supplies into the sea would be challenging, says Jaffe. "You can't just build the rigs and pull them in with tugboats, because the sea is landlocked," she says. Getting the oil out will also be tough. Even if pipelines are built, it would still cost more to get oil out of Uzbekistan than out of Saudi Arabia.
The politics and geography of the region are not the only obstacles. Even if the region reverses its long history of societal entropy; even if Central Asia quickly stabilizes, oil barons and seekers of energy security may end up disappointed. Estimates of what is underground in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and other countries in the area range wildly.
Butler and other U.S. analysts argue that the region holds between 150 and 200 billion barrels, about as much as what's found in the large fields off the Atlantic coast of South America. But Rice University geologists peg the region's proven reserves at between 15 and 31 billion barrels -- and say there may not be more than 50 billion barrels total.
"Since the late '90s, more and more oil companies drilled in this region and had disappointing results," Jaffe says. "People are more pessimistic than they were a few years ago."
The Caspian will likely never become one of world's top oil-producing regions, Jaffe says. "It's not going to happen. The region will only supply 3 to 4 million barrels of oil a day to the world by 2010," she speculates. And even if the region produces double that -- the vision of optimists like Butler -- Caspian yields will still lag far behind the Persian Gulf countries, which exported 17.5 million barrels of oil per day in 2000. The gap widens even further when one takes into account that countries like Saudi Arabia could be producing millions more, but have so far chosen to hold back, as part of an ongoing struggle to stabilize prices.
Next page: There's no avoiding the Saudi chokehold