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If we consider the relations between Russia and Azerbaijan through the prism of the oil sector, what projects do you consider to be the most interesting ones in this industry?
Vyacheslav Kulagin, director of the Center for Global Energy Markets of the Energy Research Institute
The situation in the oil sector of Azerbaijan is not so simple. Actually, for a long time, even in the former USSR, Azerbaijan was regarded as a source of oil where we, in general, took everything, supplied it to the domestic market and exported it.
But now the situation is such that, in the future, oil production will decline, and the decline will be quite serious. And now Azerbaijan is refocused on the gas sector, especially in the framework of the "Shah -Deniz" project.
So, of course, talking about the oil industry, it is necessary to say that there is no significant potential for expansion just due to the fact that there are no possibilities of production.
The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is technological cooperation, particularly technological cooperation in terms of increased oil extraction, because compared to global peers today, our oil industry, the Azerbaijani oil industry, does not reach the recovery factor of the West.
And prospects for that exist. And most importantly, indeed, all this happens against the background of fairly solid deposits that have a high degree of exhaustion both in Azerbaijan and in Russia.
That's the direction we have to develop. And some work has been done; in my view, it is quite sluggish, that is, we should go much deeper in this direction.
I am, in general, acquainted with some works that are caused, for example, by the use of biotechnology to improve the recovery factor of oil, which is now experimentally applied in Azerbaijan.
In my opinion, this is really promising. If this happens, in the scientific field and at company level we can work with the Azerbaijani side.
But again, the main focus, I think, should be placed on gas and the relationship in terms of "Shah -Deniz", in terms of how the gas will be transited, by which routes it will go from.
And here is the global political map. This is the question of "Nabucco" and TAP, all those new projects that were recently discussed, in particular in Turkey.
That is, for this "southern corridor" Azerbaijan a gas source appears. This route is probably the most interesting thing which we should speak about Azerbaijan.
Have Sechin's visit to Baku and the subsequent visit of Vladimir Putin somehow influenced the development of relations in this field?
To date, I would not say that there are some fundamental changes which have taken place in the framework of projects, but I think these visits will add some understanding.
Because, especially when we are talking about geopolitics, for a very long time we have countries such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan , and they are opposed to Russian energy field.
That is, for the West, this is an alternative to Russia. But at the same time, we live in the same region.
The Caspian Sea definitely has players which, in general, need to address the status of the Caspian Sea and, of course, those trans-Caspian gas pipeline projects, and so on.
And then we just doomed to work together. And these visits at the highest level, in my opinion, they should remove some tension and improve mutual understanding.