Chevron's Moscow representative Wojciech Swinarski said exports from Tengizchevroil, the corporation's joint venture with the state-owned Kazakh oil company Kazakhstanmunaigaz, are expected to go up by 66 percent in August compared to last month.
The move by the Kazakh government seemed to be aimed at appeasing foreign investors, who have said in the past that they would not put money in Kazakh oil projects if Chevron failed to resolve its transportation problems. Officials at the Kazakh oil ministry were not available for comment Friday.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has run into difficulties exporting oil because it must rely on Russian-controlled pipelines to reach Western markets. The Russian government has imposed stringent quotas on the use of its pipelines, seeking to secure the capacity needed to export its own crude to the West.
Mustafa Habib, a manager with Tengizshevroil, reached by phone in the Kazakh capital of Almaty, said that although the Russian authorities had not increased Kazakhstan's export quota, the Kazakh authorities have given Chevron more of the country's allotted space on Russian pipelines.
"This must be a kind of compensation for the first half of the year," he said, adding that in the first six months of 1994 Chevron only exported 600,000 tons of crude oil from the landlocked former Soviet republic, which he termed "an insignificant quantity."
Habib said that Tengizchevroil has been able to move more oil through the Russian pipelines since Aug. 1, and that barring unusual circumstances, the joint venture will export about 50,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
But he added that Kazakh authorities could redistribute the quota again in the future, and that Tengizchevroil still will not be working to full capacity under the existingt distribution scheme.
"We could produce much more," Habib said. "Now we adjust our production to the level at which we can use the pipelines."
This year Chevron pulled out 5 percent of its current Tengiz investment of between $500 million and $600 million because the export restrictions do not allow it to produce as much oil as it expected. Chevron initially planned to invest $20 billion in Tengiz over 40 years.
The corporation has been involved in plans to build a new, $1 billion pipeline to export its oil from landlocked Kazakhstan, but it has been at odds with the governments of Russia, Kazakhstan and Oman, which formed a consortium last year to build the pipeline.
Chevron officials earlier said the governments wanted Chevron to take all the risks in exchange for too little control over the project.
Habib expressed hope that Tengizchevroiol would be allowed to export more oil through existing pipelines.
"I appreciate Russia's difficulties with pipeline capacity," he said. "But I would love the quotas to go up."
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