This week Bulgaria as a European Union member has made a decision to suspend construction of the South Stream gas pipeline on its territory, via which Russian gas will be transported to Europe. How will this decision, which could lead to termination of the South Stream project, affect Azerbaijan’s gas export politics?
Ilham Shaban, expert and head of the Centre for Oil Studies, told ANN.az that the South Stream will not affect Azerbaijan’s gas export business at all. Existence of this project does not really mean anything for Azerbaijan.
“We plan to export at first 10 billion cub.m. a year and later 20 billion cub.m. a year via trans-Anadolu (TANAP) and trans-Adriatic gas pipelines (TAP). Administration of State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) said that we could increase transportation via the Southern Gas Corridor up to 31 billion cub.m. Turkey will buy 6 billion cub.m. of gas of this volume and the remaining 25 billion cub.m. of Azerbaijani gas will be exported to Turkey.
Next decade Azerbaijan could start development of the Umid/Babak gas fields and deep-lying beds Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli, Absheron and others, which will fill the pipeline ending in Europe with natural gas.
Both European and Azerbaijani press writes that Azerbaijani and Russian gas export pipelines are opposed to each other and compete with each other. They draw parallels between these gas pipelines and the competition between the European Union and the Customs Union. This is nothing, but political speculations. South Gas Corridor and South Stream have been planned in parallel and they will not intersect. If this is the truth, how they can interfere with each other, said Elshad Nasirov, SOCAR Vice President, in his interview to CNN TV channel at the end of April 2014.
Europe blockades the South Stream to get more favorable prices for energy resources from Russia, but not to refuse of the Russian gas pipelines, Shabanov concluded.
