Cheney’s Trip to Kazakhstan Takes Him to Oil’s `Final Frontier’

Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip to Kazakhstan this week takes him to a land at the crossroads of the Bush administration’s most pressing foreign-policy challenges: Russia, China, Iran and the global clamor for oil.

..Cheney’s talks Friday with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, between stops in Lithuania and Croatia, come at a critical time. Americans are in the midst of what U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has called a crisis because of rising gasoline prices driven by insufficient supply, and in Kazakhstan sits one of the world’s 10 largest oil fields.

“The Caspian basin is one the final frontiers of today’s energy development,” said Ariel Cohen, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based research group. “It is important to get this oil to the global markets, preferably bypassing Russian chokeholds.”

Bloomberg