AGRI Wonderful But Not Without Turkmenistan
At the recent Black Sea Offshore conference in Bucharest, Sergey Korsunsky, Ukrainian Ambassador to Turkey, stated: “When I heard for the first time about the AGRI (Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Inter-connector) project I thought it was wonderful. I still think that this project is very good, but without including Turkmenistan it cannot function. Azerbaijan has limited gas reserves.”
“I personally think that there were two problems with Nabucco. The first is that Statoil lobbied for TAP. The second is the fact that Nabucco had the worst management for an energy project of this magnitude. I cannot understand how, for ten years, the management of a project with the best possible route could not begin the investment,” said Sergey Korsunsky.
In June, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta stated during his official visit to Azerbaijan: “We understand the economic reasons for which TAP was chosen instead of Nabucco, but we have other successful economic projects, AGRI being one of them – and it is time to extend this project on a medium and long term. We can also mention the involvement of Azeri national company SOCAR in investments in Romania.”
In September 2013, Constantin Nita, Minister Delegate for Energy said: “AGRI is a project we are working on. We are in the feasibility study phase. The project was postponed several times for reasons I cannot now mention, but we are not giving up on this project.”
According to the schedule published on the website of the project, the feasibility study should have been completed in November 2012. The project has an estimated cost of between €1.2 billion and €4.5 billion, depending on its transport capacity.
In March, Natiq Aliyev, Energy Minister from Azerbaijan stated that AGRI project had an extremely difficult start because of financial problems and of misunderstandings between companies.
“I have created all necessary companies, all the necessary framework but we did not understand why, but the works went with difficulty. We had to find out why this happened and I think that the main problem was the financing […]. We guarantee the building of the pipeline until Georgia and for the following parts we have suggested the creation of investment groups that will bring money and invest in the units related to liquified natural gas.”
The European Commission established as a development priority until 2020 the AGRI project that implies the upgrading and extension of AGRI pipeline between Constanta, Arad (Romania) and Csanadpalota (Hungary) as well as the building of a gas terminal for an LNG terminal in Constanta.
Cristian Parvan, General Secretary of the Association of Businessmen in Romania represents an alternative solution to satisfy Romania’s natural gas needs: “I do not know in what phase the project is, there are some comments regarding the economic feasibility being affected by relative low volume of the commercial lot. I do not know the technical or economic details. In any case, Poland is almost finishing a similar project. Nabucco is an illustration of the geopolitical situation in the area, the indecision or falseness of the EU's point of view stating that it supports the project, after which it said that they are interested only in the interconnectivity (meaning to be able to move gas from Romania to Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova and so on), and not necessarily in Nabucco. Recently Croatia, Ukraine and Hungary are developing another project.”
Romania’s priority was ensuring gas supply via Nabucco that would have been developed together with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey and France. Nabucco would have carried gas to Austria. But in June the project failed because the shareholders were not able to ensure the gas suppliers and thus was replaced by TAP, which Romania is not part of, concluded Parvan.
Gabriel Petrescu