Three Oil Refineries to Be Built in Kazakh North

Excerpt from report by privately-owned Kazakh newspaper Vremya website on 31 May

In the next two years’ time, Kazakhstan will finally be able to solve the problem of lack of fuel and lubricants on its internal market and to end the import of fuel. But for this purpose raw oil should be purchased from Russia.

Three oil refineries will be built in the northern Kazakh towns of Kokshetau, Kostanay and Petropavlovsk over the next two years. Two of them will be built by Russia’s LUKoil and Gazprom Neft companies, and the other one by a Kazakh-Malaysian company, which comprises the Nord Oil and Kokshe Oil companies from the Kazakh side and Newwin Engineering from the Malaysian side.

The construction of the oil refineries by the Russian companies is the result of the Kazakh and Russian leaders’ agreement signed during Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev’s recent visit to Astana.

These plants will refine Russian oil, and for this purpose the plan is to build an extension to the Omsk-Petropavlovsk-Kostanay pipeline. This condition was put forward by the Russian side.

[Passage omitted: Kazakh state oil and gas company is to build a refinery in Ukraine]

Originally published by Vremya website, Almaty, in Russian 31 May 08.

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