Gazprom is looking for a new bypass for Ukraine
Moscow - Kyiv, December 5 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Gazprom, having closed the South Stream project, does not change its plans to get rid of Ukrainian transit. He wants to persuade Europe, which receives gas through Ukraine, to take gas from western Turkey from 2020, and to build gas pipelines there on its own. If Europe refuses, Gazprom will lose a quarter of its supplies to Europe.
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According to sources "Kommersant" In the industry, the new pipeline could be laid along the shortest route through the Black Sea - roughly parallel to the Blue Stream gas pipeline, and then go to western Turkey to the border with Greece, where a gas delivery point will be created. At the same time, Gazprom is going to negotiate with European companies that receive gas through Ukraine in order to replace the delivery points specified in their long-term contracts (currently for the majority of volumes this is the Austrian Baumgarten) with a new Turkish hub. But Europeans will have to build gas pipelines themselves to supply this gas to their markets.
This design completely changes the configuration of gas flows in southern and central Europe, while the geopolitical weight of Turkey as a transit country will increase sharply. Kommersant’s interlocutors in the market point to significant risks. “Even without mentioning how difficult the negotiations on changing the delivery points will be, the Europeans may well raise the question of moving them not to the border of Turkey and Greece, but to the border of Russia and Ukraine in order to use the Ukrainian gas transportation system,” says one of them. And most importantly, it remains unclear how Gazprom’s consumers, except Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, will receive gas from the new hub.
Some interlocutors in Europe even believe that the whole story with the cancellation of South Stream is a bluff that should push the EU to change its position on the project.
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