Strengthening partnership with Kazakhstan is one of our strategic priorities - OMV Vice-President P.Seitinger
VIENNA. October 6. KAZINFORM. /Timur Bekturganov/ - OMV - Austria's largest energy holding and one of the leading European energy companies, which successfully operates creating thousands of job places in more than 20 countries across the world. The company proved itself a reliable partner in Central, Northwestern and Southeastern Europe, Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Caspian region, including Kazakhstan. In his interview to Kazinform agency Vice President of OMV Exploration & Production GmbH Peter Seitinger talks about the perspectives of company's business in our country.
- OMV is well known as an oil&gas operator in more than 20 countries on 4 continents. What are the role and place of Kazakhstan in the list of your business partners?
- Exploration and production as well as developing further the existing partnership with Kazakhstan as crude oil supplier for OMV refineries are long term priorities - the Caspian Region is specified in the OMV's strategy as a focus area for growth. RK is a reliable and stable trade partner, providing a large part of OMV's total supply - during the last years and in 2009 we purchased over 5 million tons of Kazakh crude oil for processing in OMV refineries. We are interested in expanding the scale of our activities in Kazakhstan and ready to develop further business relationships, especially in hydrocarbon exploration & production, with your country for mutual benefit.
In this context I like to mention also the active cooperation between OMV and local authorities and businesses, including such areas as road construction and realization of different social projects that have a positive impact on the people living in the neighborhood of our activities.
- Which factors convinced you to invest in Kazakhstan?
- First of all it is the presence of vast natural resources. Political and economic stability of the host country are another important factors for investors. In general, OMV appreciates the efforts of Kazakh government to establish a stable political and economic environment in the country, but also in the entire region of Central Asia.
- After the oil spill on the coast of the United States the issue of environmental protection and security of production became very relevant. What are your priorities in this area?
- Safety of our workforce including contractor workforce and environmental protection is #1 priority for OMV E&P. We invest significant resources in improving our safety performance through creation of risk awareness in field operations as well as road traffic; we have developed strategies and work programs to continuously improve on HSEQ; we have developed and established a comprehensive oil spill response system for Komsomolskoe to name a few examples.
- What do you expect from OSCE summit in Astana?
- We are pleased to see the world leaders meeting in Kazakhstan, which provides opportunity to discuss on the highest level the actual issues of further development of international cooperation in the energy sector, including the strengthening of partnership between suppliers, transit countries and consumers.