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Energy Security Tangibles and Intangibles Technology and Policy Opposite Ends of a SoSE Paradox Spectrum. Adrian V. Gheorghe. Black, Red, Caspian, Persian …Sea. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Caspian/images/casp_fig2_gasrsrvs.gif.
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Energy Security Tangibles and Intangibles Technology and PolicyOpposite Ends of a SoSE Paradox Spectrum Adrian V. Gheorghe
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Caspian/images/casp_fig2_gasrsrvs.gifhttp://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Caspian/images/casp_fig2_gasrsrvs.gif
….The Caspian Sea region, including the Sea and the states surrounding it, is important to World energy markets because of its potential to become a major oil and natural gas exporter over the next decade ….
Desperate to meet growing domestic and European demand, Russia signed a deal Thursday with the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to build a natural gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea, a move that analysts said could strengthen Russia’s monopoly on energy exports from the region. The deal was signed in the Kremlin by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan during a conference call with President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan. Mr. Putin, who visited both countries several times over the last two years to clinch this deal, said on Russian national television that the agreement would contribute to “strengthening the European energy security.” Russia supplies more than a quarter of Europe’s gas needs; several Eastern European countries are almost completely dependent on Russia for natural gas.
Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy monopoly, has had to seek new and expensive suppliers, mostly in Central Asia, to fulfill its export contracts in Europe while also supplying its domestic market, which has rapidly expanded because of the surge in consumer spending and economic growth. “The reality is that Russia is not investing enough in its own gas infrastructure and has not enough of its own gas to supply Europe and its domestic market,” said Andrew Monaghan, director of the Russian Research Network at the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have also been wooed by the United States and the European Union, seeking access to the region’s gas fields.
The United States has been trying to persuade Central Asian nations to build a pipeline under the Caspian Sea, bypassing Russia and Iran. But that proposal has been held up by a dispute over the status of the Caspian Sea among the countries that border it, including Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia. The European Union, too, has been trying to diversify its suppliers and its routes, mainly via the Caspian Sea, by building the Nabucco gas pipeline, the union’s most ambitious infrastructure project. That project envisions a pipeline stretching about 2,000 miles from Turkey through the Balkans and Central Europe into Austria. Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Iran, which hold the largest reserves, would feed gas into the pipeline.
