Turkey is not about to be pushed around by the
Russians, and is sending signals that it still has a good variety of
options to protect its economic interests and keep the Russians at bay.
By organizing a visit to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan in the
aftermath of the Georgia war, Turkey is suggesting to Moscow that it is
ready to use its considerable influence in the Caucasus and Central
Asian regions to weaken the Kremlin’s energy grip. Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan hold some of the world’s largest energy reserves: Kazakhstan
is estimated to have 40 billion barrels of oil and 3 trillion cubic
meters of natural gas, and Turkmenistan is estimated to have 2 billion
to 6 billion barrels of oil and 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
Russia depends on these countries
to fill its orders for Europe, while the Central Asian states depend
just as much on Russia to get their product to the market through the
region’s Soviet-era energy infrastructure.
If Turkey can manage to divert some of this Central Asian energy
away from the Russians and toward the West, it can cause some
considerable pain to the Russian energy market. But accessing Turkmen
or Kazakh energy involves a whole host of problems, none of which are
going to be easy for the Turks to overcome.
The biggest problem that Turkey faces is that it has no direct land
access to these Central Asian states. For Turkey to significantly
expand its access to Central Asian crude, it would have to go through
Russia, the Caspian Sea or Iran. For obvious reasons, the Russian
option is not an attractive one. Neither Turkey nor Europe wants to
give Russia any more energy leverage than it already has.
Going through the Caspian Sea is politically much easier, but
involves building a costly underwater natural gas pipeline from
Turkmenistan through the Caspian seabed to Turkey’s Mediterranean port.
This proposed pipeline is known as the Trans-Caspian project, which has
been interminably delayed due to the legal (among other) complications
involved in dividing the seabed among the sea’s five littoral states:
Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran.
A cheaper yet more politically complicated option is to go through
Iran. The Iranians already have a 124-mile-long natural gas pipeline
connection to Turkmenistan with a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters
(bcm) per year.
