Asia Times on China oil deal with Kazakhstan

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This comes from last december 21st but it is great information on global oil and China. It talks about American strategy being defeated by the oil deal by calling it a "setback for Washington's Eurasian encirclement strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia..."- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GL21Ad01.html

The India-China energy agreement is discussed in this January 12 article- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HA14Cb05.html

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The new China pipeline runs 962 kilometers (598 miles) and will take China a third of the way to Kashagan in the Caspian Sea, one of the world's largest accessible oil reserves. Kashagan is the largest new oil discovery in decades and exceeds the size of the North Sea. This is a major reason Washington has such a strong interest in supporting democratic regime change in the Central Asia region of late.

In the next 10 years, Kazakhstan plans to almost triple oil production, prompting the landlocked nation to seek new export routes because the country wants to avoid pipelines through Russia and excessive Russian dependence. China is now among Kazakhstan's major target markets.

Best public estimates are that Kazakhstan has 35 billion barrels of discovered oil reserves, twice the amount in the North Sea, and may hold about three times more, according to a Kazakh government report released on November 18 in London. German oil engineers have privately reported that recent drilling by Italy's AGIP, the current oil consortium leader for Kashagan, a huge field offshore Kazakhstan southwest of Tengiz, has confirmed enormous oil deposits there.

The government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to produce 3.6 million barrels a day of oil from all fields in Kazakhstan, onshore and off, by 2015. For 2005, they expect to average about 1.3 million barrels a day, making Kazakhstan far larger than Azerbaijan, and second in oil production of the former Soviet states only to Russia.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GL21Ad01.html