COMBINED REPORTS


Russia, Azerbaijan and an international oil consortium near the Caspian Sea will sign an agreement by the end of the year to transport early output from the group's project through Russia, consortium officials said Thursday.


A London source from the Azerbaijan International Operating Company said the deal, initialled earlier this month, would be formally signed in Moscow.


Oleg Pilipets, senior adviser to the president of Transneft, Russia's state-run pipeline monopoly, said that AIOC, which includes the project's participants, was still finalizing the agreement.


"Transneft has fulfilled its side of the agreement and the ball is in the hands of AIOC," he said.


Under the deal, the $8 billion consortium developing light crude reserves in the Azeri sector of the Caspian will transport its early output, about 70,000 barrels per day, to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiisk from the second half of 1996. Transneft owns and operates the Russian portion of the pipeline.


The Russian route is part of a dual export route chosen by the consortium, led by an alliance of British Petroleum Co. and Norway's Statoil. The cost of building the pipeline along the Russian route would cost an estimated $100 million. The second route, to the Georgian port of Batumi, could eventually lead to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast.


The dual pipeline concept is the result of negotiations last summer between the region's governments. The consortium has let it be known that initially the Russian portion will carry the bulk of the oil but eventually most of the Caspian oil will turn south through Turkey.


The 12-member consortium plans to develop three offshore fields in the Caspian -- the Azeri, Chirag and Guneshli fields -- that could generate 700,000 barrels a day by 2010, consortium officials said. ()