Turkey needs suppliers to fuel energy hub role | beyondbrics | FT.com

Can Turkey live up to its own rhetoric of being an energy hub? According to Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister now advising the Nabucco consortium, it all hinges on the pipeline planned to bring Caspian gas to Europe.

“The only project with the capability of opening the southern corridor [from Europe to the Caspian] is Nabucco,” Mr Fischer told a conference in Istanbul on Thursday, arguing Turkey’s future “as a hub, with political power” depended on its completion.

But three projects are on the drawing board. Nabucco, an ambitious scheme to pipe up to 30bn cubic metres of gas to central Europe, is competing for supplies with two simpler schemes using Turkey’s existing infrastructure: the ITGI project to connect Azerbaijan to Greece and Italy, and the TAP project linking Albania to Italy.