Caspian Sea's petroleum and wildlife resources

Summary: The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland body of water and is rich in mineral resources, such as natural gas and petroleum. These resources have long been part of a political debate regarding the legal status of the Caspian.

The Caspian Sea accounts for more than 40 percent of all lacustrine waters. The sea has a surface area of approximately 240,097 square miles (386,400 square kilometers), although some sources give different areas, given variations in sea levels over the years. The Caspian Sea is located in an endhoreic basin, meaning it has no outflow other than evaporation. Thus, it is technically a lake, called a sea only because of its size and salinity. It became landlocked about 5.5 million years ago as a result of plate tectonics. The sea is divided into three distinct physical regions, the northern Mangyshlak Threshold, the middle Apsheron Threshold, and Southern Caspian, and is located in the Aralo-Caspian Depression, 92 feet (28 meters) below sea level. Although its mean depth is only 20 feet (6 meters), the deepest point is 3.356 feet (1.023 meters) below sea level, describing the basin as the second-deepest natural depression on Earth.

The Central Asian steppes, the lowland of Turan in the north and to the east, and the Caucasus Mountains lining the west cause a cold, continental climate. On the contrary, the Elburz in the south and southwest causes mostly warm weather.

In the north, where the main tributary, the Volga River, runs into the Caspian Sea, the salinity is very low, only about 1.2 percent; southbound, it increases to the maximum level of 30 percent in the Karabogas Gol, Turkmenistan. In reaction to the very high level of evaporation, a dam was built there in 1980, leading to the complete evaporation of the lagoon and its subsequent transformation into a salt desert. In 1992, the dam was removed. Between 1929 and 1977, the surface height of the water fell drastically, about 10 feet (3 meters) in total, caused by evaporation and too much withdrawal of water for irrigation. From then until 1994, the sea level increased, again about 10 feet, causing floods. Unexpected rises in water levels pose an ecological threat as well as an economic menace to natural gas and oil fields and to industrial landfills, including hazardous materials.

Political Issues and International Law

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, an international debate about the legal status of the Caspian has continued, not only supporting the newly independent former Soviet republics but also establishing a legal fundament allowing international profitable exploitation and transportation of abundant hydrocarbon resources. In 1992, all five littoral states—Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan—agreed to collaborate in the development of a treaty defining the water boundaries and responsibilities of each party. The final status affects three factors: access to oil and gas resources, access for fishing, and access to international waters. Through the Volga-Don Canal, the Caspian Sea is connected to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea; via the Volga River, it is connected to the Baltic Sea; and via branch canals, it is connected to the White Sea. If a body of water is labeled as “sea,” then international treaties grant access permits to foreign vessels. If a body of water is labeled merely as “lake,” then there are no such obligations. At a meeting in 2007, the Caspian littoral states signed an agreement that bars any ship not flying the national flag of a littoral state from entering Caspian waters. Previously, only two treaties, from 1921 and 1940 between the Soviet Union and Iran, regulated shipping and fishing. Additionally, and very important for current debates, the treaties defined the Caspian Sea as an inland body of water, so the line between the two sectors was to be seen as an international border in a common lake.

At a fifth summit regarding the disputed body of water in the summer of 2018, the five littoral states managed to reach an agreement, part of which resulted in assigning the Caspian special legal status to solve disagreement over its classification as a sea or a lake. According to the agreement, each littoral state will have a certain amount of territorial water but the majority of the surface of the Caspian will be considered international; military forces of nonsignatory countries are not permitted to patrol the waters. Additionally, the seabed was officially divided into sectors among the five littoral states, a move experts saw as beneficial for establishing future pipeline projects.

Hydrocarbon Resources

In the Caspian area, wells were being dug as early as the tenth century. The world’s first offshore wells were drilled in Bibi-Heybat Bay, Azerbaijan, in 1873. By 1900, Baku had more than 2,000 oil wells producing at industrial levels, falling to the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 2006, Russia opened the internationally financed South Caucasus Pipeline, allowing Azerbaijani oil to flow through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Prospected resources include the Tengiz field (1979), an oil and gas field in northwestern Kazakhstan, including the smaller Korolev field; the Kashagan oil field, close to Tengiz; and the Shah Deniz gas field (1999), off the Azerbaijani coast at a depth of 2,000 feet and operated by BP. Tengiz is operated by Tengizchevroil, with partners Chevron (50 percent), ExxonMobil (25 percent), the Kazakhstan government through KazMunayGas (20 percent), and Russian-UK LukArco (5 percent). The oil production capacity is six hundred thousand barrels per day. The oil contains about 17 percent sulfur. Primary transport of Tengiz oil is through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium project to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

Shah Deniz is a significant expected gas source for western Europe. Partners as of 2018 are BP (28.83 percent), TPAO (19 percent), Petronas (15.50 percent), SOCAR (10 percent), Lukoil (10 percent), NICO (10 percent), and SGC (6.67 percent). Gas is transported via the South Caucasus Pipeline. BP began work at the Shah Deniz 2 project, which was meant to be the starting point of a planned chain of pipelines known as the Southern Gas Corridor designed to carry gas from the Caspian to Europe, in the summer of 2018.

Further projects are the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline and the Trans-Caspian Oil Transport System, both proposed submarine pipelines, routing resources either from Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan via Azerbaijan to central Europe, bypassing both Russia and Iran. The projected capacity of the gas pipeline is 98 billion cubic feet (30 billion cubic meters) of natural gas per year. Iran and Russia, both transit countries for Turkmen gas, are opposing the construction of any undersea pipelines in the Caspian, officially because of environmental concerns. However, many nations continue researching the projected pipelines, and hopes for realizing such projects were increased by the agreement settled between the five littoral states in 2018. Furthermore, Kazakhstan proposed a 435-mile (700-kilometer) link between the Caspian and Black Seas, called the Eurasia Canal or Manych Ship Canal. Turkmenistan continued to push for the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. With Russia under sanctions for the invasion and many countries refusing to buy its oil, nations sought means to move fuels from non-Russian sources to Europe.

Etymology

Several ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks, Persians, and Khvalis, inhabited the littorals of the Caspian Sea and gave it different names. From archaeological finds in the Huto cave, south of the Caspian in Iran, human habitation of the area is estimated to be around 75,000 years old.

Strabo, a Greek historian, traced the name Caspian back to Hindu sources in Sanskrit from India, which called it Kashyap Sagar. In classical antiquity, it was called the Hyrcanian Ocean. The Persian name was and still is the Gilan Sea, similar to Ba’r Gilan in ancient Arabic. From the Khazar Turks stems the name Hazar Denizi, as it is still known by that culture today. Old Russian sources called it the Khvalyn Sea after inhabitants of Khvarezmia. The word Caspian is derived from an ancient Transcaucasian people, the Caspi.

Environmental Issues

Levels of precipitation in the region oscillate in relation to rainfall amounts in the North Atlantic. Intertwined climate relations over thousands of miles make the Caspian Sea an object for research on the consequences of climate change.

More than 130 rivers discharge into the Caspian. The Volga River provides about 80 percent of the inflow. Additional affluents are the Ural River, flowing in from the North, and the Kura River from the West. Some rivers that once emptied into the Caspian are now desiccated, such as the Syr Darya and the Uzboy River.

The region around the Caspian has developed astonishing biodiversity. For example, the Caspian seal (Phoca caspica) is one of only two seal species worldwide that live in inland waters. Species in the Caspian listed in the Red Book as endangered include a number of birds, mammals, and fish. The beluga sturgeon (Huso huso) was declared critically endangered in 2010. The eggs of the sturgeon are processed into caviar—a famous, high-priced culinary specialty. Unfortunately, corruption, pollution, destruction of spawning grounds as a result of dam construction, and overfishing have led to the dramatic reduction of some species, including sturgeon, Caspian salmon, and tuna. On the other hand, certain species reproduce invasively.

About 77,671 square miles (125,000 square kilometers) of the coast around the Caspian Sea are severely degraded, some even experiencing desertification as a result of unsustainable farm management. Pollution is not only caused by local sources but also brought into the Caspian by affluent rivers, again mainly the Volga. Many of the islands near the Azerbaijani coast, such as Bulla Island and Pirallahi Island, possess tremendous oil reserves and have suffered extensive environmental damage because of their exploitation. Proposed and constructed underwater oil and gas pipelines additionally increase potential environmental threats.

The sea and its surrounding area are affected by pollution from oil and gas extraction and industrial waste. Population increases in nearby cities and agricultural runoff have also negatively affected the water. About 85 percent of the sewage that reaches the Caspian Sea arrives via the Volga River.

Although the Caspian littoral states managed to sign a convention to protect the Caspian Sea ecosystem in Tehran in November 2003, for the most part, little action had been taken to implement it. It was hoped that the settlement regarding the legal dispute reached in 2018 would also allow for greater environmental efforts.

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