(L-R) Turkmen President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajik President Emoamli Rakhmon, Uzbek President Islam Karimov, Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar and Afghan President Khamid Karzai pose for a group photo as they gather for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Bishkek on August 16, 2007. The leaders of Russia, China and four ex-Soviet Central Asian states said on Thursday energy cooperation was the key to the security in their resource-rich region, which they intend to uphold through common instruments. (UPI Photo/Anatoli Zhdanov)

WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) -- Of all the post-Soviet Caspian nations, Western investors since 1991 looked most longingly at Turkmenistan, which was essentially unavailable during the reign of Saparmurat Niyazov.

When Niyazov died in December 2006, his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, was courted by foreign energy companies. Sixteen months after Niyazov's passing, their entreaties are starting to bear fruit.

Niyazov treated Turkmenistan's oil and gas industry as his personal fiefdom, and after he died Turkmen opposition groups in exile began to press European banks to recover some of the estimated $3.6 billion that he is believed to have stashed away. So confident is the new administration of foreign investment that it has no need of graft on such a grand scale; Bayrammurad Muradov, executive director of Turkmenistan's Presidential Administration State Agency for Management and Utilization of Hydrocarbon Resources, said that in 2008 the country expects foreign investment in the oil and gas sector to reach $2.5 billion.

Muradov had reason for optimism; Turkmenistan's government estimates its onshore hydrocarbon reserves to be 21 billion tons of oil and 25 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Even better, Turkmen Caspian offshore reserves are estimated to be 12 billion tons of oil and 5 trillion cubic meters of gas.

The fact Muradov made his upbeat predictions in Azerbaijan was hardly coincidental, as he was attending the second Caspian Oil and Gas, Trade and Transport Conference, sponsored by Britain's Confidence Energy Ltd. and the State Oil Academy of Azerbaijan. The previous week saw Muradov and his colleagues in Britain at the London Institute of Directors' Turkmenistan Oil and Gas conference.