Asiana21

RECONFIGURING NABUCCO

Robert M Cutler

Asia Times, January 28, 2010

MONTREAL - With the entry of Iraq into the mix of potential suppliers of natural gas for the Nabucco pipeline to Europe and the proliferation of alternative supply lines beyond the Russian-sponsored rival South Stream pipeline, the "classical" variant of the Nabucco pipeline is undergoing significant modification, just as it moves closer to final realization.

The first catalyst of this development was the signing by the European Union and Turkey last July in Ankara of the Nabucco Intergovernmental Agreement (NIA), which in its own words "ensures the regulatory coherence of this project and makes it compatible with the legal requirements that apply within the European Union's internal gas market" as well as with "international law, European law and the law of Turkey".

This technical legal verification is necessary in view of the fact that gas transiting Turkey is subject to a domestic Turkish legal regime while the same gas transiting EU member states is subject not only to their national legal codes but also to EU community law.

The second catalyst was a multilateral meeting this month in Batumi, one of Georgia's port cities on the Black Sea and already home to important energy infrastructure. The meeting discussed a number of projects, but in the natural gas sector its attention was focused on the White Stream project. This proposes to bypass both Russia and Turkey by taking natural gas from the Caspian Sea basin across Azerbaijan and Georgia, then under the Black Sea, for delivery to the Balkan member-states of the EU, notably Romania, and further shipment westwards. (See Turkey risks gas bypass, Asia Times Online, March 20, 2009, and Azerbaijan and Turkey clash over energy, Asia Times Online, October 23, 2009).

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