By M K Bhadrakumar
How a trans-Caspian gas pipeline project came to be named after the 19th-century Italian Romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi's famous opera Nabucco remains obscure. The opera is based on a Biblical story about the tragic plight of persecuted Jews exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Maybe, the opera's enchanting story of love and struggle or its tendency toward melodrama was considered an apt metaphor for the acute Caspian energy rivalry.
Moscow often poured scorn on the Nabucco project's dim prospects by drawing apt allusions from Verdi's opera. In the latest parody, an expert commentator in Moscow ridiculed that the "chaotic chanting" by Europeans in support of the project reminded him of the haunting chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi's opera - "beautiful, yet altogether gloomy and hopeless".
But he was mistaken, as on Monday a galaxy of European statesmen gathered under chandeliers in the banquet hall of the newly built Rixos Hotel in Ankara, Turkey, to sign an inter-governmental agreement formally launching the Nabucco project. United States President Barack Obama's special envoy on Eurasian energy issues, Richard Morningstar, was in attendance at the ceremony, affirming in unmistakable terms that Nabucco is every bit an American political venture.
With the Nabucco project finally taking off, Russia has suffered a huge setback in the geopolitics of energy in Eurasia. For the second time in a decade, Morningstar has outwitted the Kremlin. In 1999, he got the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline project going through an inter-governmental agreement at a gala ceremony in Istanbul, despite similar Russian foreboding and prophecies that it was unviable and doomed to perish.
Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary signed the document on Nabucco. The project, estimated at US$11 billion, will initially transport Central Asian gas by a new pipeline bypassing Russia, via Turkey to Austria and Germany through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.
The 3,300-kilometer pipeline, with four entry points into Turkey, will ultimately source from diverse places such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Turkmenistan and be able to pump 31 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year, or roughly 5% to 10% of the total gas consumption in the European Union (EU) by 2020. Then, there are plans for Nabucco II and a Nabucco III in the fullness of time, as Europe's needs increase. Construction work is scheduled to commence in 2010 and the pipeline will be fully operational by 2014. Two-thirds of the pipeline will pass through Turkey.
Nabucco's viability critically depends on gas supplies from Turkmenistan and Iran. Therefore, it is more than a coincidence that the Turkmen Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday that Ashgabat had agreed to increase its sales of gas to Iran to 14 bcm annually from the current 8 bcm. The Turkmen statement said a new pipeline was being laid from the Doulatabad gas fields to the Iranian border by the end of the year and that the "two sides also discussed the possibilities of further increasing supplies ... to 20 bcm". President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov earlier said on Friday in Ashgabat that Turkmenistan hoped to supply gas to Nabucco.
Clearly, Iran is gearing up as the transit corridor for Turkmen gas that will go into Nabucco. Iran has a swap arrangement with Turkmenistan. Moscow had calculated that Nabucco wouldn't materialize since it would entail the construction of a pipeline from Turkmenistan along the bottom of the Caspian Sea, which, as a littoral state, it could easily veto in alliance with Iran.
Evidently, Turkmenistan and Tehran have another idea: transport Turkmen gas to Europe via existing Iranian pipelines to Turkey. No doubt, Tehran has decided that come what may, Nabucco offers a fantastic means of entering into a strategic partnership with Europe in a near-term scenario.
As United States-Iran engagement draws closer, it is no longer an issue of "whether" or "if", but of "when" it is that European companies can tap Iran's massive gas reserves. The current US position is that it will not support Iran's involvement in Nabucco until Tehran "changes its policies". Last month, Morningstar said Iran could only join Nabucco after the normalization of ties between Washington and Tehran.
On Thursday, while speaking to the media in Ankara, he merely said inviting Iran to the project without a resolution of the nuclear standoff "could have a negative effect". But Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz swiftly clarified, "We can also easily see Iran in this project as a supplier in the future." (Iran has drawn several rounds of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear program, which it insists is for civilian purposes - others, notably the US, claim Tehran is developing a nuclear weapon.)
Yildiz pointed out that energy projects "may help improve the international environment". He added that "some European countries have already signed initial agreements with Iran" - though he wouldn't disclose their names.
<SNIP>
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KG15Ak01.html 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
