New shipyard for Caspian Sea

Italian company ENI intends to build a shipyard in the Caspian Sea. The new facility will focus on building tankers with a displacement of up to 63,000 tonnes to transport crude oil from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan. In the future, the routes will be extended to include Baku, Tbilisi and Turkey.

According to the Minister of Power and Mineral Resources of Kazakhstan, Sauat Mynbaev, all legal aspects of the project concerning the primary memorandum will be signed before the end of the month while the second document is to be signed by September. However, the implementation of the project will only begin in 2010.