Almaty (Platts)--2Jul2009

Kazakhstan's KazStroyService has completed building the 10 million
mt/year (200,000 b/d) Kenkiyak-Kumkol pipeline and plans to start pumping test
shipments of oil along it in the coming days, a spokeswoman for the company
said Friday.

The pipeline will give China direct access to Kazakhstan's oil
provinces in western Kazakhstan, allowing it to increase imports of Kazakh
crude.

"Test pumping of oil into the pipeline will take place within the next
week," said Zhanna Utarbayeva, head of the company's public relations
department.

Construction work on the pipeline, whose capacity is expected to be
doubled to 20 million mt/year in a future phase, was launched in May 2008.

The pipeline is about 845 km long and cost an estimated $1 billion to
build.

The Kenkiyak-Kumkol link is the final section of the Sino-Kazakh crude
pipeline which runs from Atyrau on the Caspian Sea coast of the Central Asian
nation, to Atasu near Kazakhstan's eastern border, then onwards to Alashankou
in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The Sino-Kazakh crude pipeline is jointly developed by Kazakh state oil
company KazMunaiGaz and Chinese state oil giant China National Petroleum Corp.

CNPC plans to pump crude from its oil fields in Kazakhstan's Aktyubinsk
Oblast to China via the Kenkiyak-Kumkol segment, which is built to connect to
the already finished Kumkol-Atasu and Atasu-Alashankou segments of the
Sino-Kazakh pipeline.

The Kenkiyak-Kumkol pipeline is also expected to give CNPC access to its
newly-acquired MangistauMunaiGaz upstream assets.

In April this year, CNPC and its publicly-listed business arm PetroChina,
along with KazMunaiGaz, jointly bought MangistauMunaiGaz (MMG) from
Indonesia's Central Asia Petroleum for $3.3 billion.

The biggest independent oil producer in Kazakhstan, MMG has rights to
explore and develop 15 oil and gas fields in Kazakhstan. Through its
subsidiary, MMG also owns licenses to tap other oil fields in the Caspian Sea
and onshore gas fields in western Kazakhstan.

As of December 31, MMG held proved and probable crude reserves of 370
million barrels, CNPC said at the time of MMG's acquisition. The company's
gas-in-place is about 41.8 billion cu m. Its crude output last year stood at
40 million barrels (110,000 b/d), CNPC added.
--Naubet Bisenov, with Winnie Lee in Hong Kong, winnie_lee@platts.com