A major new US-backed pipeline to bring oil directly from the Caspian Sea to Western markets and break Russia's longtime grip on vast energy resources from Central Asia to Turkey was formally launched yesterday in a ceremony attended by presidents and dignitaries.

The presidents of Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan were joined by other VIPs including US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and the head of British energy giant BP, John Browne, for the formal launch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's special representative for international energy co-operation, Igor Yusufov, had been expected to attend the event. A Kremlin spokesman said in Moscow that he had been forced to cancel his planned trip to Baku at the last minute due to illness.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a declaration committing some of his country's vast Caspian oil reserves to transport through the pipeline just prior to the ceremony extending the BTC's life expectancy past 2010, when Azeri oil production is expected to slump.

"The East-West energy corridor plays an important security role in the region and it's clear that economic growth and stability would not be possible without the export of oil," Turkey's President Ahmet Necdetsezer said at the opening.

He said the pipeline would take pressure off Turkey's tanker-clogged Bosphorus Straits that link the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, another major maritime transport route for oil.

The 1,770-kilometre-long pipeline will transform the Caucasus and Turkey into an energy bridge between the Caspian and the rest of the world and has shifted geo-strategic alliances in the Caucasus region and Central Asia.

Baku was the sight of some of the first industrially developed oil fields in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

The British oil giant BP holds a leading 30 percent stake in the consortium running the pipeline. Other consortium members include Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR, Amerada Hess, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Inpex, Itochu, Statoil, Total, TPAO and Unocal.

SOCAR president Natik Aliyev called the pipeline, which is expected to become a major competitor to traditional export routes for Caspian oil that pass through Russia, the "realization" of a national dream yesterday.

He said it "bridged the nations of the region."

The Caspian region produces a light crude of high quality but has suffered from its distance from the world's major consumers - North America, Europe, China and Japan.

The pipeline is to ship 1 million barrels of Caspian oil, roughly 1 percent of global oil production, daily to Turkey's Mediterranean coast once it is fully up and running by the end of the year.

(China Daily May 26, 2005)