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What Did Turkey Lose When EU Lost Nabucco?

Turkey has lost an opportunity to redefine the implicit rules of the energy sector for itself and other transit countries.
A participant walks past a poster during a meeting of the shareholders of the gas pipeline Nabucco West in Sofia January 10, 2013. The Nabucco West pipeline project has reached a funding deal with companies in the Shah Deniz consortium, boosting its prospects in a competition between two projects that aim to pipe Azeri gas into Europe. The European Union supports the delivery of Azeri gas to the region, which is expected to start in 2018 regardless of the pipeline chosen, to reduce the EU's dependency on Ru

Last week, the BP-led Shah Deniz consortium rejected the Nabucco gas pipeline project’s offer to deliver Caspian gas to Europe and Turkey. The European Commission (EC) supported Nabucco as a symbol of consumer and transit country outrage toward the dominance by a few suppliers of the natural-gas market. When the EC lost Nabucco, Turkey lost its chance to show the decisiveness of transit countries in the energy market.

On June 28, the Shah Deniz Consortium, which holds the license to exploit Azerbaijan’s 16 billion cubic meters per year gas reserves, announced it had selected the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) to bring Azeri gas from the Turkish border via Greece and Albania to Italy. Swiss Axpo (42.5%), Norwegian Statoil (42.5%) and German EON (15%) each hold shares in TAP without any involvement from transit countries such as Albania, Greece or Italy.

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