WELL-OILED FRIENDSHIP OR POLITICAL PIPE DREAM?
Ruben Zarbabyan, RT
Russia Today
86
Nov 14 2008
A meeting to discuss the diversification of Europe’s energy supply
in under way in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Members of the GUAM
Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development are in talks with
several Baltic and Black sea countries as well as with global energy
players. RT looks at the summit’s visitors and its agenda.
With Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Romania,
Bulgaria, the U.S., Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, and the EU
being represented in Baku, it is easier to point out those who won’t
be at the Baku Energy Security Summit: Russia.
This hardly comes as a surprise, as all the issues on the agenda are
more or less related to reducing the reliance on Russia as an energy
supplier, whose role is being reduced every year, according to experts.
Combating the reliance on Russia since 1918
While some GUAM members are building the pipe, others are running away.
Picture by Vladimir Kremlev Russia’s monopoly on energy supplies to
Europe has long been a concern for the latter, and seeking to diversify
its sources of hydrocarbons, Europeans have set their sights on the
Caspian countries.
It is known that the late British Empire made a desperate attempt to
gain control over the region by invading Baku during the Civil War in
the Soviet Union as early as 1918, and since then Caspian oil hasn’t
become less popular.
With proven oil reserves in the Caspian Basin (belonging to Azerbaijan,
Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan) comparable in size to the North
Sea’s, it is the sole source of oil available in the region apart
from Russia.
The biggest obstacle preventing the delivery of Caspian oil to
European consumers is transportation. Since the 1960s Russia has had
major pipelines connecting it with Europe through Ukraine, while the
first non-Russian pipeline transferring oil from the Caspian Basin –
the 1,768-kilometre-long Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan – started operating in
May 2005.
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan started operating in 2005 Of course passing through
countries with many frozen conflicts, it’s hardly the most reliable
route in the world. A major blast in Turkey’s Erzincan Province,
attributed to the Kurdistan Workers Party, disrupted its for 19 days
in August 2008.
And even while intact, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan supplies only 1 per
cent of global demand, so the energy supply to Europe still remains
a major work area for some former Soviet countries.
Eleven-yeal-old organisation becomes useful at last
Energy issues gave purpose to the GUAM Organization for Democracy and
Economic Development, an organization formed in 1997 by four former
Soviet republics – Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
It was created with a broad list of functions to combat Russian
influence in the region, but remained largely unused, before the
Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Mikhail Saakshvili’s coming to power
in Georgia.
After that GUAM intensified its cooperation within eight working
groups: power engineering, transport, trade and economics, information
and telecommunications, culture, science and education, tourism,
fighting terrorism, organized crime and dissemination of drugs.
However, energy has been, is and will remain the main area of
cooperation and the driving force of the organisation. GUAM members
became the key participants of the pro-Western energy summits held in
Krakow in May 2007, in Vilnius in October 2007 and in Kiev in May 2008.
Two-day Baku Energy Summit is the fourth.
Key transportation corridor to be discussed
Euro-Asian Oil Transportation Corridor The main agenda of the summit
includes:
– re-exportation of Turkmen and Kazakh oil and gas resources to
Europe, bypassing Russia through Azerbaijan; – sustainability of energy
sources and routes; – safety and protection of hydrocarbon pipelines;
– acceleration of energy projects.
A big topic at the summit will be the Euro-Asian Oil Transportation
Corridor, which is basically an enlarged version of the project to
extend the Odessa-Brody oil pipeline from Ukraine to Poland.
Completed in 2001 up to Brody near the Polish border, that pipeline
remained empty for three years as Russia chose to sell its own oil,
instead of transferring Kazakh oil to Odessa. In 2004, Russian oil
companies began to transfer oil from Brody to Odessa.
However, Ukraine still looks to extend this pipeline so that it can
carry Azerbaijani oil arriving from the Georgian port of Supsa to
Odessa and then take it to the Polish refinery at Plock and potentially
to the port of Gdansk.
The proposed Nabucco pipeline Some 500 kilometres of pipeline have
to be built for that to happen.
The Nabucco pipeline will be discussed as well.
Members come, members go
Of course geopolitical issues are never far away from energy.
Internal problems that exist in each of the GUAM countries remain
obstacles to an efficient integration process.
Ukraine’s Crimea has a Russian population of 70 per cent, and faces
additional problems with Crimean Tatars who seek the establishment
of a national autonomy.
Azerbaijan is still short of solutions on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue,
and doesn’t have control over several areas near it.
In Moldova, the situation of the breakaway Transdniester region remains
unresolved – 16 years after it started. Russian peacekeeping forces
have been stationed there.
Any shift in the world’s geopolitical balance (like the recognition of
Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia) is destined to have a big impact
on GUAM. Its failure to accomplish anything significant has already
lost it some members. But it continues to gain new ones.
In 1999, the organisation was renamed GUUAM due to the membership of
Uzbekistan, who signed its charter in 2001 only to withdraw in 2005,
after the country’s President, Islam Karimov, failed to attend the
summit in Chisinau, Moldova.
A similar situation is now on the cards with Moldova’s president,
Vladimir Voronin, who failed to show up at GUAM summits for two years
in a row and is absent at Baku too.
Meanwhile, GUAM also looks for new members, after giving Turkey and
Latvia a permanent observer status in 2005. After Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan reacted on the idea of joining GUAM without enthusiasm,
the organisation turned their sight on countries in Eastern Europe.
That’s why Bulgaria’s President, Angel Marin, Lithuania’s Valdas
Adamkus, Poland’s Lech Kaczynski, Romania’s Traian Basescu,
Latvia’s Valdis Zatlers, Turkey’s Abdullah Gul, as well as Estonia’s
Prime-Minister, Andrus Ansip, Hungaria’s Ferenc Gyurcsany, Greece
Development Minister, Christos Folias and top energy officials from
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all at the energy summit discussing
their roles in the development of alternative energy routes.
U.S. Energy Minister Samuel Bodman is there too to encourage them,
while his EU counterpartj, Andris Piebalgs, who left Baku just days
ago, is back again to stress the importance of the Nabucco pipeline
project.