Socar, BP, Total choose TAP to carry gas to Europe

ISTANBUL-Hürriyet Daily News

An employee checks the valve gears at Botaş, Turkey’s pipeline corporation. Reuters photo

The global companies developing the second phase of the Shah Deniz natural gas field in Azerbaijan chose the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) instead of rival Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy pipeline (ITGI), according to a spokesman of BP, a partner in the field.

“There were originally four options to carry the gas from Shah Deniz. Now the decision has been taken not to go ahead with ITGI, so now we’re down to three options,” the spokesman told Reuters.

Turkey and Azerbaijan have agreed to establish a venture that will build the Trans-Anatolia pipeline (TANAP), which stretches across Turkey from east to west, with a capacity of 16 billion cubic meters a year.
“TAP will be happy to work with the developers of TANAP for any required coordination between the two pipelines,” the TAP consortium said in January.

Nabucco, another project to carry Caspian gas to Europe via Turkey, lingers mainly due to concerns over resources and high costs.