The US magazine “Foreign Affairs” has issued an article titled “Gas politics after Ukraine. Azerbaijan, Shah Deniz, and Europe's newest energy partner” by Professor Brenda Shaffer.
The article says that this week, EU leaders signed a deal with Azerbaijan to build a pipeline for importing gas from Azerbaijan into Europe. All told, the arrangement is expected to bring billions of investment dollars into southern Europe and will, in the construction phase alone, create about 30,000 new jobs in the countries that the pipeline will eventually link: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Italy.
The author says: “The export deal has three components. First, Azerbaijan and the investing companies will jointly develop untapped parts of the Shah Deniz field and expand the capacity of the South Caucasus pipeline, which runs from Baku to central Turkey. Second, Azerbaijani and Turkish state companies will build the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, which will supply gas to Turkey through Azerbaijan and transit gas to Europe. Third, the investing companies will focus on building the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which will run through Greece, Albania, and Italy. The Shah Deniz consortium aims for the first gas deliveries to reach Turkey in 2018 and Europe in 2019. When it is complete, the project will provide 565 billion cubic feet of natural gas annually (212 billion to Turkey and 353 billion to consumers in Europe). It will also be able to handle any additional gas from other fields in Azerbaijan and, potentially, from Iraq and Israel. A number of Balkan leaders were also in attendance at the meeting this week and signed a side deal that will facilitate the extension of the Shah Deniz project to Balkan states as well.”
”As a proportion of the European Union’s overall gas supplies, the new pipeline’s contribution will be fairly modest. But for countries such as Bulgaria and Greece, which rely primarily on Russian gas, the pipeline will be critical to energy security. The interconnecting gas pipelines in Europe, filled with Azerbaijani gas, will ensure that Russia can no longer switch off the heat in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus on a whim,” the author adds.
The full text of the article is available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140569/brenda-shaffer/gas-politics-after-ukraine.

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