Azerbaijan, Baku May 9
By Dalga Khatinoglu- Trend:
While Iran's oil minister and several top officials have announced Iran's willing to export gas through Turkey to the EU, the only potential pipeline, Trans Adriatic Pipeline, is not ready to take Iranian gas until the western sanctions over this country remain unchanged.
Alireza Kameli, Managing Director of the National Iranian Gas Exports Company (NIGEC), said an Italian company has expressed interest in importing Iranian gas.
Kameli said the company wants to import Iranian gas upon the completion of a pipeline meant to transfer natural gas from Iran to Europe through Turkey, Iran's IRNA news agency reported on May 9.
He didn't mention directly Trans Adriatic Pipeline's (TAP) name, but the only potential pipeline aimed to link Turkey with Italy is TAP.
TAP is aimed for transferring natural gas from the Caspian region through Turkey to Europe in 2018.
The pipeline will go through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey and will reach Greece, to transfer gas to Albania and Italy. At the first stage, the pipeline will transfer gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field. Iran has a share of 10 percent in the field.
A representative to TAP told Trend on May 9 that "TAP is compliant with all current EU and US sanctions legislation and we continue to monitor developments in this regard".
He went on saying that "in September 2010, TAP's shareholders stated publicly that under the current political circumstances they will not transport Iranian gas resources. Our position remains unchanged."
Before Ezzatollah Ramezani, Director of the National Iranian Gas Company for International Affairs, told Iran's Mehr news agency on May 7 that negotiations on gas exports were underway with four EU nations.
He added that Turkey will be certainly one of the gas export routes.
Although he did not mention the countries with which negotiations are carried out, but
Ali Akbar Shabanpour, Managing Director of Iran's Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC) also said on May 9 that two Italian companies including a subsidiary of Eni, have held talks with POGC to provide equipment for the South Pars gas field project.
Eni had participated in development of Phases 3 and 4 of South Pars before.
South Pars is Iran's giant gas field, joint with Qatar, and holds 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Iran inaugurated 10 phases of South Pars and some of phases are under development. The project is divided to 29 phases.
South Pars's share in Iran's gas output is about 45 percent. Iran planned to boost the figure to 70 percent until 2008.
Iran produced about 575 million cubic meters of gross gas during last year.