NP? Oil & Central Asia

[Doug Millison]

http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2002/feb/0229georgia.html

"[...] Though Georgia and Chechnya themselves contain limited oil and gas
reserves, their territory is essential to both existing and proposed
pipelines to carry oil and gas out of the Caspian basin west to Turkey and
Europe. The existing Russian pipeline, from Baku to Novorossiysk on the
Black Sea, passes through Chechnya. U.S. oil companies, which have had
difficulty dealing with the Russians, have proposed two alternative
pipeline routes that pass through Georgia and Armenia. These pipelines
would allow U.S. companies, and not Russian ones, to control oil and
pipeline prices. [...] Since the collapse in 1998 of California oil company
Unocal's efforts to establish a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, the focus
of U.S. government strategy has been on a proposed gas pipeline -- a
project of the Pipeline Solutions Group, a U.S.-led consortium of oil
companies -- to be built across the Caspian, Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Turkey. Enron, with U.S. government money, conducted a feasibility study
for this pipeline. [...] "