By Orhan Coskun
Turkey wants to revise a five-nation agreement on the planned Nabucco natural gas pipeline to be able to stop other countries joining the project at the expense of the founder members, officials said yesterday. Energy analysts said Ankara was aiming to deter supplier Iran from selling gas to European countries at lower prices than those it charges Turkey. Ankara has separately launched an international arbitration process against Iran over its gas imports, officials said. The Nabucco pipeline would deliver Middle Eastern and Central Asian gas from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary and could reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian gas.
Turkish officials told Reuters that the deal is in need of revision because under the current agreement, any supplier can take part in the project and this will hurt the interests of existing partners. “Not just any country should have the chance to transport its gas to Europe by merely paying the fee. This will mean that the five nations in the project will have no advantages,” the official said.
Turkey wants the right to veto new countries that might seek to join the project, which is subject to British law, and Ankara will work with a British lawyer to revise the pipeline deal. Previous Turkish attempts to lower the price of Iranian gas have been unsuccessful.
The pipeline, a venture between state-owned Turkish pipeline company Botas, Austrian energy company OMW AG, Hungarian oil company MOL, Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz and Romania’s Transgaz, is expected to start operating in 2011. It could bring gas from Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Egypt and Syria. The project is one of several under way to ease dependency on Russian gas. The project has the backing of the United States. Russia opposes the scheme, seeing it as a threat to its role in the European energy market. “Russians want to sell gas to Greece, Italy, Israel and others via Turkey but object to Nabucco,” another official said.
Turkey has started an arbitration process against Iran because of disagreements over the price, quality and continuity of the gas it buys from Tehran via a pipeline. “Now the international arbitration process has officially started. This was inevitable because Turkey has not seen the steps it expected from Iran,” the second official said.
Iran, Turkey’s second-biggest natural gas supplier after Russia, cut its flow to Turkey in winter to 5 million cubic meters a day from the daily 26 million cubic meters agreed.
Turkey buys 65 percent of its gas from Russia, which raised its flow to Turkey this winter to help cover the supply shortage.
(Reuters, 18/4/06)