BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 26. Some important statements were made during the outgoing week in regard with various energy projects jointly implemented with Azerbaijan, Trend reports.
In particular, Azerbaijan and Georgia have announced that the work on building a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal, which was put on hold in 2015, has been resumed.
"Proceeding from current events, when Europe is especially interested in alternative gas supply sources, and everyone is talking about the energy diversification, this project has acquired particular relevance this year," Levan Davitashvili, Vice Prime Minister of Georgia said.
At the same time, Kazakhstan has also expressed interest to boost cooperation with Azerbaijan in energy industry by increasing the volumes of oil transported through Azerbaijan the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
"Now we have negotiations between KazMunayGas and Azerbaijani SOCAR on the agreement for five years to transport 1.5 million tons of oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. It remains to be decided which of the Kazakh oil companies will transport these volumes. We expect that the volumes will increase in the future," Dauren Karabayev, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of KazMunayGas JSC, said.
As Azerbaijan's Ministry of Energy announced this week, a total of 6 billion cubic meters of gas were extracted from Azerbaijan's 'Umid' gas-condensate field in the Caspian Sea, from the date of its commissioning till November 1, 2022.
"The gas field was put into operation in 2012. Currently, 4 production wells are functioning there. During the accounting period, more than 950,000 tons of condensate was extracted from the deposit," said in the publication.
Meanwhile, as Gerhard Schroder, the former chancellor of Germany, said November 22 during the 12th Türkiye Energy Summit in Antalya, gas supplies from Azerbaijan to Europe need to be increased, according to the agreement on expanding the Southern Gas Corridor’s (SGC) capacity to approximately 31 cubic billion cubic meters in the long term.
"There has been a great deal of work since 2020 on bringing natural gas to Europe via Azerbaijan. Increasing the pipeline capacity required in this sense will be very important in strengthening Türkiye's role as an energy hub," he said.
Dragan Vladisavljević, Ambassador of Serbia to Azerbaijan, also said that the importance of the SGC for European energy security is widely recognized and is growing rapidly.
"As part of its regional connectivity policy, Serbia started construction of a gas interconnector with Bulgaria on February 1, 2022. The pipeline, which is to be completed by the end of 2023, will allow our country to connect to the SGC via Bulgaria and Greece, enable the much-needed diversification of energy suppliers and energy security of Serbia. For that reason, our two countries are involved in active discussions on potential purchase of Azerbaijani gas in the coming years," the envoy said.
European Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson said making an opening speech at the European Parliament's November plenary, the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) launched on October 1, 2022, will be adding significant gas transmission capacity to Europe.
At the same time, as the ICGB, an independent transmission operator, which is responsible for the commercial operation of the IGB, said, the finishing works on the IGB are in the process of implementation, and ICGB expects them to be realized within the timeline declared by the EPC contractor and in accordance with all the requirements of the technical project.
Meanwhile, in regard with the renewable energy projects in Azerbaijan, Australian Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) said that it aims at exploring the significant untapped renewables potential of Azerbaijan by harnessing the country’s wind potential to generate energy, as well as the potential production of green hydrogen.