Construction on the Azeri-Turkish Trans Anatolia Pipeline (TANAP) project will begin this year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said during a press conference in Slovakia Forum on Feb. 6.
“We took a new step with Azerbaijan. The agreement for TANAP has been approved in the parliaments of both sides,” he said. He added that construction on the pipeline would start this year.
Erdoğan criticized the European Union for not making any visible progress in the Nabucco pipeline project, which would transport gas to Europe via Turkey. “This is a problem of the European Union, which has to supply 30 billion cubic meters of gas per year,” he said.
Turkey and Azerbaijan signed an agreement on June 26, 2012, for TANAP that would be actualized in six years with an investment of $7 billion. Turkey’s BOTAŞ and Azerbaijan’s SOCAR will work together in the project, which is slated to carry large amounts of Azeri gas to western Turkey, from where it will be transported to Europe. However, SOCAR has a nearly 62 percent stake of former state petrochemical company Petkim.
The South Stream is where pipes go under the Black Sea to bypass Belarus and Ukraine through which Russian gas exports to Europe are considered to be a rival of TANAP. Russian Gazprom recently announced that it increased total investment on the project to $39 billion, Hurriyet Daily reports.