Oil Industry Azerbaijan

Chevron Corp., Mobil Corp. and Exxon Corp. are set to sign Azerbaijan oil development contracts Aug. 1, the Azerbaijan embassy said. The contracts, which signal the next major involvement of U.S.-based petroleum companies in the oil-rich Caspian region, will be signed in Washington by Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev, said Araz Abbasov, third secretary in Azerbaijan's Washington embassy.

Huge deposits of oil from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan began flowing toward world markets Wednesday, fostering hopes that mineral wealth will make the war-ravaged Caucasus region as rich as the Persian Gulf during the 21st century and assure Azerbaijan independence from Moscow. Watched by U.S. and other Western investors, President Heydar A. Aliyev turned on the tap at an oil platform 80 miles offshore in the Caspian Sea to produce a symbolic first sample of crude.

The lure of oil--as much as $4 trillion worth--is drawing the United States deep into distant and dangerous lands around the Caspian Sea. Although few Americans know the region, the prospect of enormous energy deposits is likely to make the Caspian as familiar a part of the world for the next generation of Americans as the Persian Gulf is for today's. It has already pulled in a who's who of oil industry giants and let loose a multibillion-dollar wave of international investment.

Ever since their past was swallowed up by war in 1993, the members of Azerbaijan's Karabakh soccer team have lived the shiftless lives of refugees, carrying on with their sport even though they have not set eyes on their homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh since its Armenian majority drove the men out of the disputed enclave in a vicious ethnic war. The dispossessed soccer stars slowly reassembled in this filthy industrial town 300 miles east of the sparkling, but now deadly, hills of their birth.

Waiting to clear customs at Baku's international airport, Texas-based courier Frank Woeste cradled a package of oil-drill brake pads and seals he had packed into a battered paper bag and hand-carried 9,500 miles from Houston--the only safe way to get the badly needed parts here quickly. Welcome to the Caspian Sea, the world's largest landlocked body of water, repository of some of the most plentiful deposits of crude oil and natural gas on Earth.

Two Southern California Armenian-American groups have launched a boycott of Unocal Corp. service stations to protest the oil company's negotiations with the Republic of Azerbaijan to develop a giant oil field in the Caspian Sea. They say that Unocal and other U.S. energy companies are tilting toward Azerbaijan in its bloody war with Armenia.