EU hails Azerbaijan's role in energy security
By Aynur Karimova
Azerbaijan’s role in ensuring the energy security of the EU countries has been once again stressed by one of the EU's officials.
Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Commissioner for Climate and Energy, said in an interview with Euronews that the security of energy supply routes is an absolute priority for the EU, and therefore, the EU wants to diversify the supply routes.
“What we are doing now, through declaring projects of a community interest and financing to facilitate connecting Europe, which is to say the Connecting Europe Facility, is to support projects with interconnections with the electricity sector and the gas sector, such as the Southern Gas Corridor linking Italy with Azerbaijan, and we can have access to Azerbaijan’s gas,” Cañete noted.
The Southern Gas Corridor project envisages the transportation of the gas extracted at the giant Shah Deniz field in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea. Shah Deniz Stage 2 gas will make a 3,500 kilometer journey from the Caspian Sea into Europe. This requires upgrading the existing infrastructure and the development of a chain of new pipelines.
The existing South Caucasus Pipeline will be expanded with a new parallel pipeline across Azerbaijan and Georgia, while the Trans-Anatolian pipeline will transport Shah Deniz gas across Turkey to join the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which will take gas through Greece and Albania into Italy.
The Southern Gas Corridor is set to change the energy map of the entire region, connecting gas supplies in the Caspian to markets in Europe for the very first time.
The first gas supplies through the corridor to Georgia and Turkey are given a target date of late 2018. Gas deliveries to Europe are expected just over a year after the first gas is produced offshore in Azerbaijan.
The Southern Gas Corridor pipeline system has been designed to be scalable to twice its initial capacity to accommodate additional gas supplies in the future.
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Aynur Karimova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Aynur_Karimova
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