Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, Aug.20 / Trend, H.Hasanov /
U.S. companies seek an incentive of Turkmenistan in order to participate in the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline project, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake told reporters during his visit to Central Asia.
"Many American companies are very interested in participating," he said adding that the road show will be going to the United States but also other countries as well.
Blake stressed that progress on this issue depends on what is on offer.
"There are a lot of risks to participating in such a pipeline. Part of their consideration will be what kind of incentives Turkmenistan will be prepared to offer international companies to get involved in that project. We will see when the road show takes place," Blake said.
He said there will be a road show that will take place sometime in September, at which they will begin to have concrete discussions about who is going to form and lead this consortium to actually build this pipeline.
"This is a crucial series of discussions that will take place," Blake said.
The project was supposed to be implemented in the early nineties, when the operator was the American company Unocal leading an international consortium. The idea came to naught after the Taliban loudly declared itself the leader of the major transit country - Afghanistan - where a significant part of the pipe would be laid.
The Ashgabat interstate agreement of member stated that the practical implementation of the TAPI project signed in late 2010 is the base document to promote TAPI project.
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammadov at a recent meeting said that holding road show with the participation of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Singapore, New York, London may attract major investors to construction of TAPI.
Penspen has developed a feasibility study on the project. Its design capacity is 33 billion cubic meters of gas a year. The length of TAPI could reach 1,680 kilometers, with a design capacity of 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. The route is planned from the Turkmen Dovletabat fields through Herat and Kandahar (Afghanistan), via the districts of Quetta (Pakistan), to Fazlaka on the India-Pakistan border.