MOSCOW, April 4 (RIA Novosti) - Russia and Kazakhstan have agreed to more than double the output capacity of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), the Kazakh president said Tuesday.
Nursultan Nazarbayev said the output capacity of the CPC, a 935-mile pipeline that links oil fields in western Kazakhstan with the Russian Black Sea coast, would be increased from the current 28 million to 67 million metric tons.
"...This means that in the next seven or eight years the increase in oil production in Kazakhstan will be backed by transportation possibilities," Nazarbayev said.
The president also said the two countries would work together to develop oil deposits on the Caspian Sea shelf.
"We will be jointly developing three large deposits - the Kurmangazy, Khvalynsk and Tsentralnoye," he said.
President Vladimir Putin said in turn that LUKoil, Russia's no.1 independent crude producer, had invested $3 billion in Kazakhstan's economy in recent years and was not the only company that was working or wanted to work in Kazakhstan.
