Is this any place to drill for oil? the temperature plunges to -40F in winter, then soars to 120F in summer, when swarms of mosquitoes make life even more unbearable. On top of that, workers must wear gas masks and carry oxygen packs, since just a whiff of the invisible hydrosulfide gas that seeps from the ground can cause instant death. "In winter it is difficult to motivate anyone to work," says Larry Barthold, general manager of the joint venture that U.S. oil giant Chevron and the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan have formed to tap the wealth that lies beneath this forbidding site. "In summer everyone smells funny because of the antimosquito spray. And it's so hot, work does not continue at a steady pace."
Yet it is here, on the steppes of Central Asia, that Chevron has staked much of its future and doubled its potential worldwide oil reserves by the stroke of a pen on a contract. Over the next 40 years, the company and the Kazakh government plan to invest $20 billion to develop the vast Tengiz field near the Caspian Sea, which contains some of the richest sources of oil and gas on earth. So deep are the deposits that geologists have yet to find the bottom. The oil-saturated rock formations are "two or three times the thickness of anywhere else in the world," estimates a senior official of the U.S. Department of Energy. "We're talking about trillions of dollars of revenues from the 30 billion to 60 billion barrels of oil."
Chevron's foray into Kazakhstan is part of the biggest global oil rush since energy explorers moved into the Middle East after World War II. Starting with the end of the cold war a few years ago, immense stretches of oil and gas lands -- from the Arctic Circle to China's Tarim Basin to the waters off Vietnam -- have opened up to multinational firms as host countries strive to develop their resources and earn hard currency.
The end of the cold war is only part of the story. Countries that were not part of the communist orbit but kept their oil industries under tight national control are also opening their arms to the capital, technology and management skills that international oil firms offer. Venezuela's state-owned oil industry took in foreign partners last year, entering joint ventures with Conoco, Mitsubishi and Shell. Foreign firms have flocked into Colombia to develop the Cusiana and Cupiagua fields, which together constitute the largest find in the western hemisphere since wildcatters struck oil in 1967 in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.
Because most of the new fields are in inhospitable regions, exploitation costs are huge. In Canada a consortium led by Mobil is investing $4 billion to build and install the world's heaviest -- and costliest -- drilling platform 200 miles southeast of the coast of Newfoundland. The 1.1 million-ton rig, designed to withstand collisions with the giant icebergs that regularly drift through the area, will begin tapping the North Atlantic's 2 billion-bbl. Hibernia field in 1997.