BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 26. Turkmenistan, with significant stranded production capacity, has the ability to contribute, in the form of deliveries to Azerbaijan and Turkey, considerable volumes which could then free up LNG currently supplied to Turkey for export to European markets, Trend reports via The Atlantic Council.
The Atlantic Council experts believe that this could happen in three ways:
- By immediately approving the construction of a 78-kilometer subsea pipeline to deliver 5 bcma to Azerbaijan from the existing Magtymguly field on its side of the Caspian.
- By immediately approving a doubling of the current swap arrangement with Iran and Azerbaijan from around 2-3 bcma to 4-6 bcma.
- By building on the fact that the first deliveries of Iranian gas to Turkey in 2001 were in fact Turkmen in origin to develop a similar swap system with Iran to deliver around 5 bcma to Turkey. Infrastructure constraints mean these are the likely maximum levels for swap arrangements.
The EU is proposing to cut around 100 bcm from its total its total gas consumption this year, and, though this is not stated explicitly, most or even all of this reduction would come from Russia. That amounts to more than a quarter of its 2021 consumption of 379.9 bcm in 2021 and more than two-thirds of the 145 bcm that the EU imported from Russia in 2021.
But just how this is to be achieved has yet to be determined, with the EU’s statement simply saying: “The Commission proposes to work with Member States to identify the most suitable projects to meet these objectives, building on the extensive work done already on national Recovery and Resilience Plans.”
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