Buried Hill Serdar Limited, the Turkmen subsidiary of the British oil and gas company Buried Hill Energy, has filed a claim against Turkmenistan with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The case was registered on August 12 of this year. Since 2007, the company has been conducting exploration at the disputed Serdar oil and gas condensate field in the Caspian Sea.
No case materials have yet been published on the ICSID website.
In November 2007, Buried Hill signed a production-sharing agreement with the Turkmen government and received a license to explore Block III in the Caspian Sea, which includes the large Serdar oil field.
However, the field, located on the maritime border between Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, has long been the subject of a dispute between the two countries. In Azerbaijan, the field was known as Kyapaz.
Disputes over it and over the division of the Caspian Sea more broadly even led to the moment when, at the first summit of Caspian states in Ashgabat in 2002, then-Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov uttered his famous phrase: “There is a smell of blood on the Caspian.”
Because of the field’s disputed status, Buried Hill carried out no drilling. In June 2012, an incident occurred when Azerbaijani border forces prevented a Turkmen research vessel from conducting seismic surveys at the site.
In early 2021, the leaders of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan signed a memorandum of understanding on joint exploration, development and production of hydrocarbon resources at the field, which received a new shared name — Dostluk (“Friendship”).
According to turkmen.news sources in the country’s oil and gas sector, Buried Hill had hoped to join the exploration and drilling project, but it appears the company was not included.
Turkmenistan will be represented in international arbitration by the U.S. law firm Squire Patton Boggs, which has successfully defended the government’s interests in many other proceedings. Buried Hill is represented by attorneys from the equally prestigious law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
