TENGIZ (Kazakhstan): The Tengiz oilfield in Kazakhstan is a blend of Western corporate culture and old Soviet ways — even through it’s been years since US oil firm Chevron came to develop it.

Cheerful slogans like “Be a winner!” and “Lead a healthy lifestyle!” have replaced Soviet propaganda posters on the walls, and English is heard here as often as Kazakh or Russian.

And yet it is one of the world’s most desolate corners — scorching hot in summer and life-threateningly cold in winter — and a stiff wind blows year-round. The closest town is a 45-minute flight on a rickety propeller plane.

“This is like the edge of the world,” said one worker from India. People call it the Wild East.

Geologists discovered oil in this part of the Caspian Sea in 1979. Two years after the Soviet Union crumbled, Chevron Corp. moved in to extract oil from its wells together with Kazakh state oil company KazMunaiGas and other firms.

“Back then it really wasn’t pleasant here at all,” said Steve Green, a services administration manager from Britain. “There’s been a certain amount of Western influence since I first came here in 1994.”

Tengiz is one of the world’s biggest oilfields. Its expansion has contributed to an oil-fuelled boom in Kazakhstan’s economy. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has run the Central Asian state since 1989, is said to be personally supervising the project.

In the nearby town of Atyrau, the country’s so-called oil capital, sleek skyscrapers, luxury hotels and fenced “cottage” villages for foreigners lie alongside dismal Soviet-era buildings, dirt streets and one-storey houses where Kazakh families live.

Many local residents who have missed out on the oil boom complain they are not seeing any benefits.

“Teachers here get $100, and we all know how much people are getting paid up there,” said one Atyrau resident who works in a Soviet-era sanatorium.

Residents also complain about cash being channelled towards construction of Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, instead of helping reduce poverty in Atyrau.

At Tengiz, it’s business as usual. A big pump station towers high above the steppe, its metallic surface gleaming in the sun.

This is where the Chevron-led Caspian pipeline starts. It takes crude across the steppe along the muddy shore line of the Caspian Sea to far-away markets in the West.

Surrounded by a bleak steppe for hundreds of miles, Tengiz is a 4,100 square km labyrinth of shiny pipes and production facilities.

Tengiz, which means “ocean” in Kazakh, has potential estimated recoverable reserves of up to 9 billion barrels, according to Chevron.

It employs 3,500 people and up to 13,000 contractors working on a new, $5.5 billion project to double oil production in the coming years. Around 20 per cent of the workforce is foreign.

Foreign workers brought everything with them: from recipes to production standards to a widely manifested obsession with workplace safety — a regulation often ignored in old Soviet-era plants where work-related fatalities are commonplace.

“How am I driving?” asks an English-language poster inside a Tengiz bus. For those who want to make a complaint, there is a telephone number below the sign. All the workers have to carry around a respirator in case of a gas leak.

In a workers’ canteen around the corner from the pump station, Kazakhs, Americans and Europeans all eat together. —Reuters