In the next year the Azerbaijani consortium of the major gas deposit Shah Deniz will decide on the route of gas exports to the EU within the Southern Gas Corridor. The consortium has three variants. At the first stage the choice should be made between the pipeline project Nabucco and the BP project SEEP. The chosen route will compete with the Transadriatic gas pipeline, which will export gas to Italy.
However, considering recent events, the possibility of considering Nabucco as a real project for gas export becomes more and more dim – April was a month of irretrievable losses for the project. On April 24th the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, unexpectedly stated that one of Nabucco's share-holders had decided to leave the project.
Nabucco has many unclear moments which are difficult to be ignore, the agency Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing the Hungarian company MOL which is a holder of 100% shares of the gas transferring company FGSZ – one of six share-holders of Nabucco. MOL explained the decision by the fact that sources of natural gas and financing for Nabucco haven’t been defined yet, and its complete cost is also unknown. This is a big blow to Nabucco. The point is not increased financial risks for other share-holders or the loss of a strategic investor. The fact that MOL puts into doubt the project as a whole is more important.
New image losses followed the first stress. “Bulgaria has no opportunity to implement the gas pipeline project Nabucco,” the prime minister of Bulgaria, Boiko Borisov, said at the meeting with the chairman of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy. The worst thing is that the statement was voiced a month after the government of Bulgaria granted Nabucco the status of a facility of state importance. “The priority of Nabucco as a facility of state importance will enable the speedy construction of the pipeline on Bulgarian territory,” the managing director of Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH, Reinhard Mitchek, said at that time.
The last but not the least disappointing development came from Baku, which stated that Azerbaijan didn’t aspire to the Nabucco project and had no intention of investing money in it. The head of the department for socio-political issues under the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan, Ali Hasanov, stated in an interview to the Turkish newspaper Jumhurriyet that the EU had initiated Nabucco and “requested additional gas from Azerbaijan, but at the moment we have no additional gas.”
The failure of the European initiative is obvious. It is not a surprise, despite all the hopes of the West. Only these hopes could explain the new concept of Nabucco – Nabucco West, which presupposed a shorter route and a smaller capacity of the pipeline.
The step is more than reasonable, as a less money-losing project could have more chances of being implemented. And the fate of Nabucco could be saved by Baku and Ankara, if they announced construction of the TANAP.
After announcement of the TANAP construction, with 16 billion-cubic-metre capacity annually from the eastern border of Turkey to the western border of Azerbaijan, it was clear that Nabucco wouldn’t be implemented in its initial variant. And this could be a chance for Nabucco to survive.
However, despite the political support of the West, too many reasons for closing the Nabucco project have appeared in recent times. Considering the fact that the Russian gas pipeline South Stream should pass through the territory of Hungary parallel to Nabucco, it is not a surprise that MOL decided to leave Nabucco. The company could gain more profit from participation in South Stream which has no problems with financing.
Elmira Tariverdiyeva, Baku. Exclusively to VK
