“Happiness would be multiple oil pipelines,” says Steven Mann, one of the longest serving US diplomats in the Caspian region. The goal, shared by foreign governments and oil companies, to diversify export routes out of the Caspian region’s biggest producer, Kazakhstan, has proved elusive.

Thirteen years after breaking free from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has grown a 1m barrels per day oil industry that supplies more oil to world markets every year.