Baku, Azerbaijan, March 10
By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:
Azerbaijan's gas reserves are quite enough to fill Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), Natiq Aliyev, Azerbaijani energy minister, said in an interview with Natural Gas Europe.
He said that the project is designed to export Shah Deniz gas field's second phase (SD2) gas and Azerbaijani gas is its major source.
"During the next decade, the Absheron gas field is expected to be started and other fields also developed," he said. "Azerbaijan's gas reserves are quite enough to fill SGC, but it is open to other states' reserves as well. "We have good experience in this sphere."
"We started the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to transit Azeri oil, but within a few years of the project's start-up in 2006, it began shipping oil from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan," he said. "We should adopt that approach for the SGC."
The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for EU. It envisages transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Georgia and Turkey.
At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.
As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.