Oil Industry Kazakhstan

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.

Royal Dutch/Shell, Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and the government of Kazakhstan agreed to undertake a study on the feasibility of dual oil and gas pipelines from Kazakhstan, through the Caspian Sea and overland to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The pipeline, if constructed, would serve as a central route by which landlocked Kazakhstan would move its oil and natural gas reserves to western markets.

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.

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.