Kamran Bekzatov at Sixty

NURZHAN — Kamran Bekzatov was born in Kobozev, as Nurzhan was then called, on 28 January 1951, two years after oil was struck in the lower Chu basin. His father, Rashid Bekzatov, was chief engineer at the Kobozev Heavy Machine Plant, and his mother, Valentina Bekzatova, was a physician at the city polyclinic. He went to Russian-language schools, and in 1969 he left for Moscow to study at the Gubkin Institute of the Petrochemical and Gas Industry, graduating in 1974 as a petroleum reservoir engineer.

For the next fourteen years he worked in the oilfields of Western Siberia under the USSR Ministry of the Oil Industry, rising from field engineer to chief engineer of a production unit near Nizhnevartovsk. In 1988 he came home as general director of Iradneft, the republic's oil production trust, and brought with him the water-injection methods and rotary drilling equipment that slowed the decline of the aging Chu fields.

In 1993 Iradneft became NurGaz, and Bekzatov has led the company since. Its Northern Export Feeder, opened in 2000, carries crude to the Kazakh network near Shymkent, and NurGaz is now the largest commercial taxpayer in the zone. He has never stood for office. A company spokeswoman said he would mark the day privately with his wife, Galina, and their three children.