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European Pipeline Loses Bid To Ship Gas

European Pipeline Loses Bid To Ship Gas
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Πεμ, 27 Ιουνίου 2013 - 16:27
A centerpiece of the European Union's push to limit its reliance on Russian natural gas came to an unsuccessful conclusion Wednesday after the Nabucco West pipeline consortium lost its bid to ship gas from Azerbaijan into Europe.
A centerpiece of the European Union's push to limit its reliance on Russian natural gas came to an unsuccessful conclusion Wednesday after the Nabucco West pipeline consortium lost its bid to ship gas from Azerbaijan into Europe .

Austrian oil and gas company OMV AG, one of the Nabucco partners, said the Shah Deniz consortium -- which is developing Azerbaijan 's Caspian Sea gas with plans to begin shipping it in 2019 through Turkey -- rejected Nabucco as the onward link to Europe . Without that gas, Nabucco, a decade in the planning, appears unlikely to be built.

The decision leaves the rival Trans Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP, as the only other candidate. But TAP, which people close to the matter said would be awarded the contract on Friday, plans to initially ship just a third of the gas that was originally intended for Nabucco. And control of gas deliveries to Europe will now rest with Shah Deniz rather than with European customers.

Nabucco's defeat was the latest high-profile EU energy initiative to founder, underscoring the Continent's difficulty in forging a coherent energy policy.

The EU is also struggling to fix its carbon-dioxide emissions-trading system, in which an oversupply of permits to emit the gas has driven prices too low to be a strong incentive to invest in clean energy. Several nations are also questioning the affordability of plans to subsidize wind and solar power to hit an EU-wide target of deriving 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

European policy makers, and several of the Continent's largest energy companies, had strongly backed Nabucco for years as a cornerstone of EU efforts to diversify energy sources away from Russia, which meets around one-quarter of the EU's natural-gas needs.

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