The draft's sentence is plain: the ministry "will carry out demining work in area No. 200 of the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea, through which the routes of the designed subsea oil pipelines of the Kalamkas-More and Khazar investment project will pass". Its authors explain that the defence and energy ministries signed a memorandum with the operator in May 2025, under which the company buys the special equipment and hands it over to the ministry, and that the ministry's underwater search and explosive-engineering work creates no income for the operator for corporate income tax or the alternative subsoil-use tax. That tax clause is why the arrangement sits in a tax bill.
The bill amends the code that took effect on 1 January; its main part is expected in force on 1 January 2027 once parliament passes it, Prime writes.
The project joins two adjacent offshore fields for joint development. Prime puts the forecast recoverable reserves of the two blocks at 81 million tonnes of oil, the total reserves of Kalamkas-More alone at 284.5 million tonnes, and the gas at about 19 billion cubic metres; Reuters, in March, quoted the project's hydrocarbon reserves at about 238.1 million tonnes.
In March, Askhat Khassenov, chairman of KazMunayGas, said the design stage had been completed and that further implementation was suspended because of the sanctions imposed on Lukoil, Reuters reported on 26 March. From April the partners have been examining financing options that take the Russian company's sanctions into account, Neftegaz.ru reported this week.
That tax clause is why the arrangement sits in a tax bill.
The demining is planned on the memorandum's terms regardless. A state army will survey and clear a seabed corridor for pipelines whose financing is under review, for an operator half-owned by a company whose sanctions, its partner says, stopped the project. The bill settles the tax treatment; who finances the pipes is not settled.