KAZAKH ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS PROTEST OIL CONSORTIUM'S WASTE DISPOSAL TECHNIQUE
The consortium, led by Italy's Eni SpA announced at public hearings in the Kazakh oil capital of Atyrau last month that it is planning to inject waste from its drilling operations at the Kashagan oil field back into the Caspian seabed.
The head of the Caspian Nature environmental group, Mokhambet Khakimov, said the high pressure at which the waste will be pumped into the seabed would risk contaminating the sea with poisonous hydrogen sulfide and mercaptan, a chemical that gives odorless natural gas a detectable smell.
The consortium will need to drill up to 280 wells before the start of oil extraction planned for 2007-08.
Kashagan, which is the world's biggest oil discovery in the past 30 years, contains an estimated 4.8 billion tons of oil.
The Caspian Sea is believed to have the world's third-largest untapped oil and gas reserves. Environmentalists have long been expressing alarm about the negative impact on the sea from oil exploration, blaming oil companies for the mysterious deaths of 30,000 Caspian seals in 2002. An official commission said the seals' deaths weren't linked to oil production.
Several environmental groups said last week the Eni-led consortium had failed to convince them the injection method is safe.
The Italian oil and gas giant is leading a group of companies comprised of Total SA, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, ExxonMobil Corp, ConocoPhillips, and Japan's Inpex.
The initial output in 2008 is estimated at 75,000 barrels of oil a day, reaching the maximum plateau of 1.2 million barrels a day in 2016, according to Eni. The Central Asian nation aims at tripling its crude output to around 3 million barrels a day by 2015.