Azerbaijan's $33 billion state oil fund is to help finance the $8 billion Trans-Anatolian natural gas pipeline project (TANAP) to take Azeri gas to Turkey and to markets in Europe, Reuters reported yesterday, quoting the head of the fund.

Turkey has a 20 percent stake in TANAP, while Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR holds 80 percent. SOCAR offered BP, Statoil and Total to buy 29 percent of the total from its stake in September.

Construction of the TANAP pipeline, which will be built from the Turkish-Georgian border to Turkey's border with Europe, is expected to start at the end of 2013 and the project's first phase is seen ready at the end of 2017 or early 2018.

TANAP is set to take some 10 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas a year from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz II field to Europe, while Turkey, which aims to cut its dependence on Russian gas, will get 6 bcm.

The project is designed to be expandable to 30 bcm and ultimately 60 bcm a year.

The head of Azerbaijan's state oil fund Shakhmar Movsumov said it also planned to co-finance several other major energy projects in the oil-rich country next year, including construction of a new oil refinery, a gas liquefaction plant and a chemical plant. "The state oil fund will start financing the TANAP project in 2013. Besides that, it will participate in financing of an oil-gas-chemical complex construction project," Movsumov said in parliament during a discussion of the state budget draft for the next year.

Nabucco takes Bulgaria step

Meanwhile, Nabucco, one of the two projects bidding to carry the TANAP gas to Europe from western Turkey, announced yesterday that the 422-kilometer-long Bulgarian section of its pipeline has entered the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Approval phase. This was a further step by the consortium in its race with the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project.

Earlier this year, Nabucco announced the completion of the EIA-permit process for the Hungarian section of the route.

Unofficially withdrawing from a larger plan to carry Caspian natural gas to Europe directly, Nabucco has changed its strategy to transport gas from western Turkey to the continent. This came after concrete steps by Turkey and Azerbaijan, which agreed to build TANAP.

Source: bne