Turkey, EU sign gas pipeline deal
ANKARA: Turkey and four EU countries formally agreed yesterday to route a new natural gas pipeline across their territories, pushing ahead with a US- and EU-backed attempt to make Europe less dependent on Russian gas.
The Nabucco project can't entirely break Europe's dependence on Russian exports - it may in fact require supplies from Russia to fill its 31 billion cubic meters of capacity - but seeks rather to diversify the region's energy sources.
The prime ministers of Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary signed a deal to allow the pipeline to cross their countries, linking Europe to gas resources in Central Asia and the Middle East.
"We have started to confound the skeptics, the unbelievers. Now that we have an agreement, I believe that this pipeline is inevitable rather than just probable," said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Iraq, Egypt and Syria all said yesterday that they were ready to contribute gas, as did Turkmenistan on Friday. To feed Nabucco, however, Turkmen gas would have to be brought across the Caspian Sea to its western shore in Azerbaijan, which said it is giving priority to the project.
"Nabucco will provide energy security to Turkey, to southeast Europe and to Central Europe. Nabucco is thus a truly European project," Barroso said. "Turkey and the EU have tackled together a common challenge: the security and diversification of their energy supplies."
Russia provides over a quarter of Europe's gas, and 80 percent of that moves over Ukrainian pipelines. By diversifying imports and redirecting some of the Russian shipments through Nabucco, Europe could prevent a repeat of the January crisis in which all deliveries through Ukraine were suddenly cut off because of a price dispute. Still, Nabucco's impact is likely to remain small, as the volume of gas it can carry will be no more than 5 percent of Europe's consumption.
The 3,300 km projected pipeline would run from the Caspian Sea across Turkey to Austria and involves investments of 8 billion euros ($10.26 billion), according to EU data.
Moscow, meanwhile, is pushing hard for new pipelines to Europe for its own gas - the so-called Nord Stream through the Baltic Sea to Germany and South Stream through Bulgaria.
AP
(China Daily 07/14/2009 page12)
