EXTRACT: …a new East-West contest… as consequential as the nuclear-weapons face-off of the past: the battle for energy supplies… Shortly before Christmas, Russian President Vladimir Putin forced Royal Dutch Shell to cede control of Sakhalin II, the world’s biggest oil and gas project, to the state-owned giant Gazprom, opening the North Pacific island’s vast resources to Asian markets.
THE ARTICLE
By Vivienne Walt/Baku
In the control room of Azerbaijan’s sprawling oil terminal near the capital, Baku, Bala Mirza sits peering at a fuzzy map on a computer monitor. The outline of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey looks like little more than a jumble of hills and farming towns. But for the engineer, 41, what lies underground has rocked his world: a new 1,100-mile oil pipeline, which in recent months has tied this tiny country on the edge of the Caspian Sea to the huge Western market. “There is a lot of oil and a lot of money,” says Mirza, who spent 14 years earning about $10 a month working on a creaking old Soviet oil rig. “And because there is a lot of money, our lives will surely improve.” read more
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