Turkmenistan Makes Europe Worry on Gas
As though it weren’t enough for Nabucco to have to compete against the Gazprom-Eni South Stream project, locking the EU into just one supplier from the East. Then Turkmenistan had to go and pull a move out of the Kremlin’s book and cut off supply – raising additional worries that even if Europe were able to diversify and get some Central Asia gas without passing through Russia, there could still be problems anyways. Reuters reports on the Caspian problem behind European energy security:
Turkmenistan, which Brussels has been trying to lure into becoming a major Nabucco supplier, cut off supplies to Iran at the end of December, creating a domino effect that stretched to Greece and raising doubts about its reliability as a supplier. “Last week’s developments haven’t exactly helped Nabucco’s arguments in favour of energy security,” said Jonathan Stern of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.