By EMILY CADEI — OZY
There aren’t many places Ed Chow could fly to that would be farther from his Washington D.C. base than that nearly impossible-to-spell, ex-Soviet Union satellite Azerbaijan. Indeed, its ancient walled-city capital of Baku, with flat expanses far from most commercial hubs or route to an ocean, can really feel like the ends of the earth. But as if he were some frequent-flier junkie, Chow has made the 15-hour haul dozens of times for the same reason so many foreign business and political bigwigs have: its ridiculous amounts of energy resources.
–
Hence the long-running and pricey effort to snake a series of gas pipelines from Baku across Turkey’s Anatolian peninsula, the Aegean and Adriatic Seas and all the way to the boot of Italy. For Azerbaijan, the gas exports are a much-needed way to secure its energy-driven economy as its oil production begins to wane, and Europe is its only real export market for gas, says Chow. Europe, of course, has been trying for years to suss out other sources of gas aside from Russia, a task that got more urgent after a feud over Ukraine exploded early in 2014.The U.S’s. own energy boom, meanwhile doesn’t help, since the gas can’t ready reach there.
When completed, the pipeline is slated to carry roughly 16 billion cubic meters of gas per year. That’s not much compared to the 160 bcm Russia pumps to Europe via Ukraine, Belarus and Germany. But the political significance of the pipeline is important, since for years Russia had been in talks with the European Union to build a pipeline along a similar route, which Palti-Guzman suggests was aimed at competing with the “Southern Gas Corridor” that Azerbaijan is using. As it tries to move things along, Azerbaijan will need to tread carefully with its big neighbor to the north. “They don’t want to threaten their big brother, in a way,” says Palti-Guzman. Let the gas games begin.
