Amanda Paul Today's Zaman
At the end of June, the long-awaited decision regarding which pipeline will be selected to transport natural gas from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz II field across Turkey to the EU market will be made.
This decision will be followed by the final investment
decision in late 2013. Production is expected to begin in 2018 at some 16
billion cubic meters (bcm) per year: 10 bcm for Europe and 6 bcm for Turkey.
Last year the field of runners was narrowed to two: Nabucco
West and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The available gas is only enough to
fill one of them. Both projects not only have economic but also political
implications.
Officials from both Nabucco West and TAP are currently
engaged in major lobbying campaigns to promote their respective projects to the
Shah Deniz partners, the Azerbaijani government and the developers of the
proposed TANAP pipeline across Turkey that would feed into their projects. While the
Shah Deniz II Consortium will present their opinion to Azerbaijan over which
pipe should be chosen, Azerbaijan is not obliged to follow this advice.
Nabucco West has always been labeled a geostrategic project.
It would ship gas from Turkey’s western border via Bulgaria, Romania and
Hungary and into the Baumgarten hub in Austria and into Central and Eastern
Europe where it is badly needed with many of the countries heavily, or in some
cases fully dependent, on Russian gas.
TAP would bring gas across Greece to Italy. However,
the recipient countries do not urgently require further diversification of
their gas supplies. Italy is quite saturated, with gas coming from several
pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) from North Africa, Russia and the
Middle East. Bankrupt Greece regards TAP as a good opportunity to help drag the
country out of its economic crisis and turn Greece into a strategic transit
point. Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is due to visit Azerbaijan shortly
to lobby for TAP. Azerbaijan is interested in expanding its strategic
cooperation with Greece, including possibly buying up Greece’s DESFA pipeline,
while also having an interest in upstream projects and investing in other
sectors too.
The selected route is supposed to be the most commercially
viable and the selected market able to offer to the seller’s long-term security
of demand for a period of at least 20-25 years. While presently TAP is more
commercially viable -- the Nabucco offer currently has a negative revenue flow
and a high transportation tariff -- at the same time TAP has lagged behind in
terms of certain legal preparations, and it does not enjoy the same political
support as Nabucco West, which is backed by an inter-governmental agreement.
Moreover, while TAP may be an attractive corporate business project, it does
not reflect the strategic goals and priorities that had inspired the European
Commission to design the Southern Gas Corridor. The Nabucco Consortium members
have called on the EU to back their project, underlining the strategic
rationale of the project and the European Commission’s own criteria.
Nabucco West is not appreciated by Russia, and Moscow has
tried to erode support amongst the countries involved. With Russian gas
currently representing some 30 percent of all EU gas imports, it is Russia’s
largest export market. Meanwhile, the Russians are also moving ahead with their
South Stream project that they claim will be on line in 2015 before Nabucco and
that will bring further volumes of Russian gas to the EU market.
As for Azerbaijan, Baku’s official position is that both
pipelines will be judged pragmatically on a commercial basis, ruling out
political considerations. Yet clearly there will be political considerations
that could tip the decision, and key meetings will take place between Brussels
and Baku in the coming weeks. Moreover, the EU and Azerbaijan are moving
ahead with talks on a new strategic relationship that aims to underline the
importance of the EU-Azerbaijan partnership, while Baku would clearly welcome
greater support from the EU on the issue of its territorial integrity in terms
of explicit recognition -- something that the EU has so far found impossible to
do.
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