The top US diplomat dealing with Caspian energy issues remains certain that a “southern corridor” taking natural gas from the Caspian Basin to Europe will be built. But the envoy added that Turkmenistan is unlikely to be one of the countries supplying the gas.
“I'm as convinced as ever that there will be a southern corridor,” Richard Morningstar, US special envoy for Eurasian energy, said during a recent appearance at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington, DC. A long-awaited sales and transit agreement signed in June between Azerbaijan and Turkey “certainly opens the door to that,” Morningstar said. “There is a lot of work to be done, but there will be a southern corridor.”
Morningstar said the United States still prefers the larger Nabucco pipeline to the smaller ITGI (Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy) and TAP (Trans-Adriatic Pipeline) projects. “In the abstract, Nabucco would be the preferable project. It's most advantageous from a political standpoint, from a strategic standpoint.”
But questions remain, he acknowledged, over where the gas would come from to fill the capacity of Nabucco.
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