KABUL: Afghanistan will start pumping oil within months, an official said Wednesday, as part of the troubled nation's efforts to tap its underground treasures estimated at billions.
China's National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and its Afghan partner the Watan Group will start extracting oil in five months, initially producing 5,000 barrels a day, mining ministry spokesman Jawad Omar told AFP.
This would be the first extraction of oil in Afghanistan, a mineral-rich country which is still one of the poorest in the world after three decades of war.
"The maximum production at the beginning will be 5,000 barrels a day but this will increase to 45,000 barrels a day," Omar said, without giving a timetable for the increase.
The extraction will start in the "Afghan-Tajik Zone", one of the major oil deposits along the Amu Darya river border in relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan, the spokesman said.
Under a deal signed last December, the oil will be processed in refineries already being built within Afghanistan, while Afghanistan will take 70 percent of the net profits on top of a 15 percent corporation tax.
The Afghan-Tajik deposit is estimated to contain about 87 million barrels of oil, relatively small globally but significant for poverty-stricken Afghanistan.
Afghanistan currently imports all its oil and most of its gas, mostly from Central Asian countries and Iran, which on Monday signed a deal to supply its neighbour with a million tonnes of fuel oil, petrol and aviation fuel a year.
Citing aerial studies, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) says that the war-scarred country sits on more than $1 trillion worth of minerals.
China, flush with foreign exchange reserves and undeterred by the hazards of frontier capitalism, bought the first tendered oil and copper concessions, leading the list of Afghanistan's neighbours bidding for mining rights.
The huge Aynak mine south of Kabul, to which China won extraction rights in 2007, could yield over 11 million tonnes of copper, according to Soviet-era data and a newer study by the USGS.
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