The Caspian Events company organized the exhibition together with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Azerbaijan.
According to the source, the exhibition will feature pavilions of over 280 companies from about 40 countries. The companies will include ConocoPhillips, Itochu, Russia's LUKoil and Transneft, Statoil, Total, Azerbaijan's Gosneftekompania (state oil company), Azneftkhimmash, Baku Steel Company. The exhibition will last into June 10.
On June 8, the second day of the exhibition, a traditional conference on oil and gas will gather about 300 delegates to consider issues of extracting and transporting energy resources in the Caspian region.
The agenda of the conference includes: strategic development of Caspian oil and gas resources; development of Caspian depots and extraction; and regional investment and sustainable development.
The floor is to be given to representatives of Azerbaijan's Gosneftekompania, the Georgian National Oil Corporation, the National Iranian Gas Corporation, the Iranian Foreign Ministry, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Turkish company BOTAS, and Russia's State Duma (lower house of parliament).
Reports will also be heard on Caspian oil and gas transportation. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline project will be presented.
On June 9, the second day of the conference, will feature presentations on the Caspian service sector by contractor companies operating in the region. The conferees will also consider corporate social responsibility issues.
The BTC project is the most substantial and expensive in the international oil sector today. The pipeline costs $3.6 billion, including $1.3 billion contributed by the BTC consortium, and the rest of the sum by external sources, in particular, the World Bank and the EBRD. The pipeline's daily capacity will total a million barrels of oil to be transported from the Azeri coast to the Ceyhan port of Turkey on the Mediterranean. A total of 443 km of the pipeline will run across Azerbaijan, 248 km across Georgia, and 1,076 km across Turkey (the total length is 1,767 km).
The BTC project will open the way to "the great Caspian oil" - which does not exist yet but is expected to appear, optimists say - to the Mediterranean bypassing the Bosphorus Strait and the Dardanelles Straits by land. For today, all the oil pipelines beginning in the Caspian region lead to the Black Sea (Baku-Novorossiisk, Baku-Supsa, the system of the Caspian pipeline consortium).
There is no official information about overall oil deposits in the Caspian, with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran being the littoral states. Assumptions differ between 4 to 30 billion metric tons of standard fuel. Azerbaijan's oil deposits are estimated at about 10 billion metric tons.
