The European Union faces two obstacles to its project to pipe gas via a southern corridor from the Caspian region and thus reduce western Europe’s dependence on Russian supplies: Turkey’s attitude and the Balkan activities of Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian oil monopoly.
After receiving less than a warm embrace by the EU, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration and the Turkish public are not eager to jump on the EU bandwagon when it comes to the southern gas corridor. Ankara’s objective is to turn Turkey into a regional energy hub. This means that Turkey would not be a transit state, but a buyer and reseller of Caspian gas to European customers. Of course, Mr Erdogan is playing hardball to get this status for Turkey. But it is a proposal the EU must refuse. There is no added value in buying Turkish gas when we can be buying Azeri and Turkmen gas directly from the producers.
European energy supply security has been suffering partly because of the problems that exist between the producing countries and transit states. The most recent example is the Russian-Ukrainian “gas war three”.
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