Plans for a pipeline to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across the bottom of the Caspian Sea and on to Europe have been on the drawing board for a quarter of a century.
The project never progressed to the construction stage due to factors such as the earlier bad relations between Turkmenistan and the country where the proposed pipeline would exit the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, the undefined legal status of the Caspian, and fellow Caspian littoral states Russia and Iran raising concerns about possible environmental damage.
The first two issues have now been cleared up.
In the meantime, the price of natural gas in Europe has been regularly topping $1,000 per 1,000 cubic meters in recent weeks, and there are concerns in European Union countries that Russia, which supplied about 43 percent of the EU’s gas imports in 2020, is gaining undesirable leverage in dealings with Brussels due to EU dependence on Russian gas.
That has some in Europe taking a fresh look at old projects for the diversification of gas imports.
A new company called Trans Caspian Resources has a plan for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan.
The project is more modest than the original Trans-Caspian Pipeline, and it immediately serves only the needs of Azerbaijan for extra gas. But it does look to finally construct a pipeline that links Turkmenistan with the western Caspian shore and it could be the stepping-stone to more ambitious projects in the future.
On this week’s Majlis Podcast, RFE/RL’s media-relations manager, Muhammad Tahir, moderates a discussion on Trans Caspian Resources’ new project.
This week’s guests are: from Virginia, Allan Mustard, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkmenistan and co-manager of Trans Caspian Resources; from Britain, John Roberts, an energy security specialist on Central Asia and the Caucasus who is on the advisory committee at Trans Caspian Resources; from Scotland, Luca Anceschi, who is a professor of Central Asian Studies at Glasgow University and author of the book Turkmenistan’s Foreign Policy – Positive Neutrality And The Consolidation Of The Turkmen regime; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036