As reported on this blog before, Kazakhstan is turning green on its oil industry and has already threatened TCO with hefty fines should the company not comply with environmental regulations at Tengiz.

The move is apparently part of a wider strategy not to boost oil production at any price, reports the Gulf Times:

The Kazakh government, which had planned to lift annual output to at least 150mn tonnes (3mn bpd) by 2015, now wants to raise standards of environmental protection.

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“It won’t be a tragedy if in 2015 we extract” less than the target, Ural Mukhamedzhanov, the chairman of the Kazakh lower chamber of parliament, said late on Monday in an interview in London. “I would even curb some projects for the sake of the ecological balance.”

The fact that ex-Soviet countries care about the environment is always slightly suspicious. Although Kazakhstan has a rather long tradition of green movements (e.g. the protests against nuclear testing near Semipalatinsk in the 1980s), there are several other ramifications of this new green conscience: (more…)