Anatolian pipeline to be built on Azerbaijani money

The capacity of a new Azerbaijan-Turkey gas pipeline in the first stage will be 16 billion cubic meters. This was announced today at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a consortium that will build a pipeline by the Energy Minister Natig Aliyev, Trend reports with reference to the Hurriyet newspaper.

The minister said that in the future capacity will be increased to 24 billion cubic meters. Azerbaijan has enough energy resources to fill the pipeline, said Aliyev.

In turn, the Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Taner Yildiz said that the costs of the pipeline project Trans Anadolu are divided between Turkey and Azerbaijan in the proportion of 20 and 80 percent respectively. Later, however, share distribution may change, he said.

Turkey and Azerbaijan signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a consortium that will build a pipeline to supply natural gas from Azerbaijani field "Shah Deniz" in Europe through Turkish territory.

According to Taner Yildiz, the cost of the pipeline will be determined by SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan). He noted that it may be close to the previously voiced figures of five billion dollars.

Project participants plan to resolve all issues connected to this pipeline in 2012 and begin the construction process, so that the project will be completed by the end of 2017, when  the second stage of development of Azerbaijani gas field "Shah Deniz" will be lounched.

The founders of the consortium are  SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan), Turkish pipeline operator Botas  and the Turkish oil company Turkiye Petrolleri. In the future the consortium may include other international oil and gas companies.

The consortium developing Azeri gas field "Shah Deniz" (whose amount of reserves are estimated at 1.2 trillion cubic meters) examines possible routes for exporting gas to Europe, in particular,  the routes of the Southern Gas Corridor.

Southern Gas Corridor is a priority for the EU energy projects. It is intended to diversify the routes and sources of supply and thereby increase the energy security of the EU.