Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb. 3 /Trend A.Badalova/
Azerbaijan-Turkish Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and Nabucco gas pipeline project, are unlikely join their forces in delivering Azerbaijani gas to European markets, Professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris Terence Murphy believes.
"Were TANAP to seek a partner I would imagine it would look for a smaller, more manageable partner like ITGI (Turkey-Greece-Italy gas pipeline) or TAP (Trans Adriatic Pipeline), Murphy told Trend via e-mail. Perhaps even to BP's more recent entry, the South East Europe Pipeline."
TANAP is Azerbaijani-Turkish project, which envisages construction of the pipeline from the eastern border of Turkey to the country's western border. Azerbaijan and Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding to establish the consortium that will build a gas pipeline with the initial capacity at 16 billion cubic metres. The cost of TANAP will be set by SOCAR and may be close to the figure of $5 billion. The parties involved in the project intend to resolve issues on this gas pipeline this year and plans to commence construction immediately will see completion by late 2017.
Earlier, last year Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said that TANAP which will be built on the Turkish territory can be connected to the Nabucco gas pipeline, which is designed to transport gas from the Caspian region and Middle East to the European countries. The pipeline will be laid from the Georgian-Turkish and Iraqi-Turkish borders to the Austrian Baumgarten. It will run through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria over a distance of 3,900 kilometres.
However, last week the Turkish Energy Ministry spokesman told dpa that Turkey is no longer fully supporting the European Union-backed Nabucco pipeline project, and is instead prioritizing its own rival TANAP project.
"Expensive and with an unsure control over supplies, Nabucco has frequently been criticized as an overly ambitious project," Murphy said.
He believes that unless Turkmenistan gas flow under the Caspian to Azerbaijan and into the southern corridor supply line, and unless Iranian gas contribute to gas supplies to the same system, Nabucco does not have the supplies necessary to meet its 31 bmc capacity.
"And as those developments are highly unlikely any time soon, Nabucco is not dead, but the Nabucco consortium works under severe constraints," Murphy said.
The construction of Nabucco pipeline with maximum capacity of 31 billion cubic meters is planned to start in 2013 and its first supplies are scheduled for 2017. Gas produced during the second stage of Azerbaijani Shah Deniz gas condensate field development is to be the main source for the Nabucco project. On Oct. 1, Nabucco, along with other projects within the Southern Gas Corridor (TAP, ITGI), submitted their final proposals to the Azerbaijani side, which will review them in accordance with previously announced criteria.
Nabucco also considers Iraq and Turkmenistan as the other potential sources for the project's ater stage of realization.