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Nearly 30 years ago as the Soviet Union lay in tatters, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan signed off on the Caspian's first oil and gas megaprojects, hoping to guarantee their independence by transforming the region's energy landscape and their role in it. Nursultan Nazarbayev, then president of Kazakhstan, took the first step in April 1993 by creating Tengizchevroil (TCO), a joint venture between Chevron and Kazakh state oil company KazMunaiGaz, to develop the super-giant Tengiz oil field and nearby Korolev field. Today, Chevron still holds 50% of the venture, ExxonMobil controls 25%, KazMunaiGaz, 20%, and LukArco, a subsidiary of Russia's Lukoil, 5%. A year and a half later, in September 1994, Azerbaijan's president, the late Heydar Aliyev, signed a production-sharing agreement (PSA) to develop the deepwater reserves of the Azeri, Chirag, and Gunashli (ACG) fields, attracting the participation of a "who's who" of the world's oil and gas elit 13 global companies representing eight countries. These and other signings had a knock-on effect as more upstream megaprojects popped up across the region in the late 1990s and throughout the early 2000s, attracting more international participation and the need to develop midstream infrastructure such as Azerbaijan's Baku‑Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) export line to Turkey and Kazakhstan's Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to Russia's oil export terminal at Novorossiysk, as landlocked Central Asia devised ways to get its crude oil to market.
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