Today's Zaman: TANAP should not repeat Nabucco’s mistakes

When the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) was announced last year, European natural gas consumers breathed a collective sigh of relief.

After more than a decade of fruitless wrangling over transit and investment terms for Southern Gas Corridor projects such as Nabucco and Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI), it seemed that the holder of the gas, Azerbaijan, and the most important transit country, Turkey, had circumvented European fecklessness to get the job done themselves. But now it seems that agreement is in serious doubt, with the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) and Turkey’s Petroleum Pipeline Corporation (BOTAŞ) and the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) bickering over the pipeline’s ownership structure. If the Turkic brothers cannot reach an agreement soon, TANAP risks getting stuck in a stalemate, repeating the mistakes of previous pipeline proposals.  MORE