Oil-producing states near the Caspian Sea should set up a regional oil organization similar to OPEC, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev told Interfax.

Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan are among the countries that have large oil deposits in the region and Iran is the only member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to border the Caspian Sea. "World experts confirm that, by and large, the reason why Arab countries and OPEC are nervous is not so much the scale of Caspian deposits as the fact that the states in the region are not members of the cartel," Nazarbayev said in an interview with Interfax in Astana. Caspian states "should set up their own organization before it is too late," he said. Iran, which borders the Caspian Sea, is one of the 11 members of OPEC, which was founded in 1960. Russia and Kazakhstan have sometimes attended OPEC conferences as observers.