The cold weather in Europe and inability of Russian gas giant Gazprom to deliver as much gas as European consumers want at the moment is a clear indication that Europe needs to boost its energy security. What the EU calls its Southern Gas Corridor has always been a part of that process. “The whole point of the Southern Corridor has been to deliver new gas to Europe through new routes and the combination of those two things is extremely important. The Southern Corridor is new gas and it is new routes and what we’ve seen happening in the last few days is a clear indication that it is very necessary,” Julian Lee, Senior Energy Analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES) told New Europe on 10 February from London where gas prices remained high as cold weather meant that UK gas demand continued to outstrip supplies, requiring storage withdrawals.

Nabucco, Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), and Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI) are competing to build the infrastructure to carry gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz II gas field to Europe. At present, operator BP and possibly other Shah Deniz consortium members are examining which project can transport the initial 10 bcm from the field. On 6 February, Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told reporters that he expects an agreement on gas deliveries to Europe from Azerbaijan to be reached in the next two to three months. "I can live with any pipeline," he said.

Lee told New Europe on 10 February the Azerbaijan-Turkey project, the Trans-Anatolia Gas Pipeline (TAGP; Turkish acronym TANAP), is probably the front runner to get the gas to the western border of Turkey. “How it gets from there to Europe is still very open and to some extent depends on what markets this gas is going to,” he said, adding that individual distributors and individual countries will buy this gas and not the whole European market.

TAGP would replace Nabucco across Turkey's territory. “I think that Nabucco in the way that it was originally envisaged as a pipeline running from Turkey’s eastern border all the way to Europe that is probably over. I don’t think that is going to happen,” Lee said. “We will see the Trans-Anatolian pipeline being built. There is probably too much momentum behind that to falter now,” the CGES expert said. But he made the case for a shortened Nabucco that runs just from the Turkey-Bulgaria border to Austria. “What is clearly needed is a pipeline that is economically viable to start off delivering 10bn cubic metres a year of Azerbaijani gas to Europe that can subsequently be expanded either to carry additional Azerbaijani gas from other projects or to carry gas potentially from Northern Iraq or potentially even from Turkmenistan. The problem with Nabucco as it was originally put forward is that it seemed always to need 30-31bn cubic metres of gas to be profitable and it couldn’t been done on less than that and even if that wasn’t the case that’s how it appeared,” Lee said. As for smaller projects such as TAP or ITGI that would cross Greece territory on the way to Italy, Lee said that decision would depend very much on who the buyers are.

KGeropoulos@NEurope.eu

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