The Caspian Sea: Rich in oil and gas and caviar

AKTAU, Kazakhstan: The leaders of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan are meeting in the Kazakh port city of Aktau on Sunday to sign a landmark deal on the Caspian Sea. Here are some facts about the inland sea whose legal status has been the subject of fraught negotiations for over two decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Vast inland sea

The Caspian is the largest inland body of water in the world. With around 70,000 cubic kilometers (16,800 cubic miles) of water, it is bigger by volume than both the North and Baltic seas. The region’s countries have long disputed whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake, which carries legal consequences. No rivers flow out of it and it is surrounded by land which means it is technically closer to being a lake. The new draft agreement calls it a sea while Russia said the provisions give it a special legal status.

Energy-rich

One of the reasons the Caspian has been contested so fiercely by the five littoral states is its abundance of hydrocarbon reserves. According to the US Energy Information Administration’s latest estimate in 2012 there were 48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet (8.3 trillion cubic meters) of natural gas in proved and probable reserves in the Caspian Sea’s basins and its surrounding area.

The Caspian’s largest oil field, Kazakhstan’s Kashagan, has 13 billion barrels of recoverable reserves and is the biggest offshore oil and gas find since it was discovered in 2000. Extracting the hydrocarbons from the water and on to the market has not always been easy though, and delays to the Kashagan project have led to it being nicknamed “cash all gone”.

Costliest caviar

As home to the world’s largest stocks of the giant Beluga sturgeon fish, the Caspian is also an important source of one of the world’s priciest delicacies-caviar. The most expensive Caspian caviar comes from the eggs of the rare albino sturgeon found in its southern waters, but environmental campaigners warn that sturgeon stocks are being overfished, and hope the new agreement will boost preservation efforts. According to Guinness World Records, a kilogram of the costliest caviar from albino sturgeon off the coast of Iran regularly fetches over $25,000. —