After many years of speculation about possible gas pipelines to be built in the so-called Southern Corridor, a first likely winner will be announced shortly. It probably won’t be the EU-backed Nabucco nor the Russian-backed South Stream, but the much less ambitious Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), owned by Eon, Statoil and EGL. This is the prediction of Friedbert Pflüger, Director of the European Centre for Energy and Resource Security (EUCERS) at King’s College London. In this article written for EER, Pflüger, who served for twenty years as a Member of Parliament and was State Secretary in the first Merkel government, explains why the Southern Gas Corridor is crucial to Europe’s energy future and how it is likely to develop.
There have been lengthy speculations in recent years about the Southern Gas Corridor – seemingly endless discussions about various pipeline concepts, and their geopolitical meaning and economic feasibility. This is understandable, as the different projects have numerous stakeholders, including transit governments, gas buyers, transportation companies and international financial institutions that are involved in project-financing. But these discussions will soon come to an end – at least for the time being. This is because the consortium operating the Shah Deniz II gas field in Azerbaijan, which needs to come on stream by 2018-2020, will shortly have to announce how they will arrange for the transport and sale of 10 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas annually – the first and, for now, the only major non-Russian gas supply that will traverse the Southern Corridor. Taking into account all the pros and cons of the pipeline projects downstream of Turkey, the most likely winner of the first leg of the race will not be Nabucco, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI), or South Stream but rather the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP).
