Al-Uloom said, "We held our meeting with Alekperov within the framework of the program of the Oil Ministry contacts with representatives of the largest foreign oil companies to inform them about a new policy in the sphere of exploration of Iraq's natural resources. All the agreements concluded by the former authorities with foreign firms will be scrutinized and re-assessed from the viewpoint of Iraq's interests," said he.

Before the outbreak of war in Iraq in March 2003, Lukoil and the government of deposed President Saddam Hussein signed an agreement on Lukoil's role in developing southern Iraq's Western Kurna-2 oilfield, one of the world's largest, with Lukoil receiving a 70 percent share in the project.

The two sides reached an agreement on Lukoil's future participation in renovating Iraq's oil industry and discussed training Iraqi students in Russia. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zubari said in regard to Russian participation in developing the Western Kurna-2 oil field, "We do not intend to take any discriminatory steps against this or that state as concerns their participation in oil development."

Kazakhstan is making its resources available to more East Asian nations. South Korea and Kazakhstan have concluded their first meeting on the Kazakh-South Korean joint committee for energy and mineral resource cooperation about developing Kazakh offshore Caspian oilfields. KazMunaiGaz and Korea National Oil initialed a joint agreement.

Kazakhstan's Energy Ministry's geology committee and the Korean state resource corporation KORES have also reached agreement on joint research in Southeast Kazakhstan. South Korean Minister of Trade Yi Hui-pom hopes that the oil deposit development projects between the two countries will be a touchstone for the development in the resource industry, Interfax reported.

Hui-pom talked of Korea's dependency on energy and mineral resource imports while Kazakhstan serves as a rich resource base. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for 2005 in Seoul. Yi Hui-pom said that he hoped talks would boost the development of joint projects to exploit Kazakh mineral resources, adding that South Korea is totally dependent on imports of the energy and mineral resources.

Seeking to ally environmentalists' fears, the chairman of Azerbaijan's Committee for Protection of Oil Workers' Rights Mirvari Gahramanly held a news conference about monitoring the impact of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline in Azerbaijan. Gahramanly noted that two monitoring sessions have been held after receiving financial support from the Global Green Ground Fund and the Open Society Institute - Assistance Foundation. The first monitoring session was in the Tovuz, Aghstafa and Shamkir districts, the second in Aghdash, Ujar and Yevlakh districts.

Gahramanly noted that the assessment of lands traversed by the BTC pipeline had been incorrectly carried out. Gahramanly alleged that the pipes used in constructing BTC construction were of poor quality, adding there allegedly were irregularities in observing labor safety of the workers involved in the construction activities and that no labor contracts had been signed with the workforce.

Gahramanly also noted that the workers were uninsured. Gahramanly added that the salaries of Azeri workers building the Azeri section of the BTC pipeline were lower than those paid to construction workers in Georgia. Gahramanly concluded by noting that district executives were interfering in the social investment programs provided for in the BTC project and calling on public and non-governmental organizations to pay more attention to the issues raised by the monitoring sessions.

Egypt's Oil Minister Samah Fahmi has been meeting with Iran's Oil Minister Bizhan Namdar-Zangeneh to discuss deepening cooperation in joint oil, gas and petrochemical projects. Fahmi and Namdar-Zangeneh discussed setting up joint firms to market oil products, studying how to integrate the two nations' petrochemical projects.

Namdar-Zangeneh is currently in Egypt to attend the fourth ministerial conference of natural-gas exporting countries. Representatives of 14 gas producing and exporting nations are in attendance at the meeting; its sessions focus on technical cooperation, exchange of expertise and information and technology transfers to boost members' output.

In the past year, Australia's Perth-based Alinta natural gas distributor has spent $3 billion, growing in the process from being a single-city gas distributor to Australia's third-largest energy company. U.S. group Duke Energy International announced Sunday that Alinta had been awarded an international tender to construct its Australian and New Zealand gas pipeline and electricity-generation assets; JP Morgan is underwriting the tender. The sale price is $1.69 billion; additional charges will mean that the final cost to Alinta is $1.86 billion.

The market had forecast that the Duke tender would sell for about $1.5 billion. The Duke deal follows other acquisitions. In July 2003, Alinta paid about $900 million when the assets of United Energy were sold off to acquire 34 percent of UE's Victorian electricity network. Another Alinta purchase was a 19.9 percent equity stake in the Victorian Multinet Gas distribution network, while selling down its Western Australia gas network to 75 percent.

British Petroleum is testing its new oil terminal at Nansha in southern China's Guangdong province. A 5,000 MT fuel oil vessel is scheduled to arrive on March 16; officials hope that its cargo can be offloaded later in the day. If the first test run is successful, another vessel carrying 60,000 tons of fuel is set to arrive in early April. Chinese officials hope that the Nansha terminal will be capable of handling vessels up to 80,000 tons when the facility becomes fully operational.

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