In August, Georgia's role as part of a safe, US-supported alternative to Russian and Iranian transit routes was undermined during a conflict with Moscow. Russian aircraft apparently bombed the area of the Caucasian republic's pipelines, causing transit disruption. The same month, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, or BTC, pipeline which crosses Georgia was shut due to a fire on the Turkish side. The Georgian events overshadowed worries about Iran's own supply risks: only a month earlier, oil prices had reached a record at $147/brl following concerns of an imminent strike on Iran by Israel or the US. Iran now wants to take advantage of the Caucasus crisis to promote itself as a safer alternative for oil coming from the Caspian Sea region, which includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Mr Khatibi said Azerbaijan has already diverted some of its crude exports through Iran "because of the Georgia problem". However, an official at Azerbaijan's national oil company SOCAR said only one tanker of Azeri oil was exported through Iran and the BTC pipe remained the preferred route. Iran is already bartering Kazakh crude, which it refines, in exchange for Iranian crude exported to Asian countries. It wants to expand that role by increasing capacity of the route where the Caspian oil transits from 100,000brl/d currently to 500,000brl/d. Mr Khatibi said Iran is in talks with potential investors in the expansion project and Korea, India, Malaysia, China, and Japanese companies are interested. "Western investors are also welcome," he said. Some analysts are sceptical that Iran can rebrand itself as a major alternative export route to Georgia. "The difficulty that people have had with Iran relates to US and international sanctions," Julian Lee, a Caspian oil expert at the UK's Centre for Global Energy Studies, is reported as saying. "If Iran builds the pipeline to the Gulf of Oman, the US would put pressure on countries using the Iranian pipelines as transit. Sanctions would prevent (western) companies from using the pipeline", he continued, pointing out that this is an issue since the majority of foreign-owned oil production in Kazakhstan that might move southwards is in the hands of European and US companies. A further plan has also emerged from Dubai, who's government is understood to have said that it would build a $200-billion canal to by-pass the Strait of Hormuz that forms the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The route is used by Iran for its tankers, but the Islamic Republic has hinted it could block the Strait if the country is attacked. Mr Khatibi declined to comment on the Dubai announcement, but said that "if the relationship (between the US and Iran) was to improve... there would be much greater use of Iran as an export route."