Tag: Energy

  • Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources says no electricity agreement signed with Armenia

    Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources says no electricity agreement signed with Armenia

     [ 11 Sep 2008 16:05 ]

    Ankara–APA. Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Hilmi Guler said they had not signed any agreement to purchase electric energy from Armenia. Guler said some private companies negotiated this issue with Armenia, but no documents were signed, APA quotes the Turkish news agencies.

    Armenia’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Armen Movsisyan said they would sell electric energy to Turkey beginning from 2009. He said during President Abdullah Gul’s visit to Armenia they had signed agreement about the export of electricity from Armenia to Turkey via Gars.

  • Armenia to Supply Electricity to Turkey

    Armenia to Supply Electricity to Turkey

     

     

     

     

     

    By Ruben Meloyan

    A senior government official has confirmed that Armenia will start exporting electricity to neighboring Turkey by the end of this year.

    Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Armen Movsisian told RFE/RL on Thursday that an agreement on that had been reached “at the high level” and that he expects no “political obstacles” to the project that he says will be of a long-term nature.

    The announcement of the deal came days after the first-ever visit of a Turkish head of state to Armenia. While in Yerevan last Saturday Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisian discussed possibilities of normalizing bilateral ties between the two countries with historically strained relations.

    Representatives of the UNIT Company engaged in importation and distribution of high-voltage electricity in Turkey also reportedly attended the visit of President Gul to Yerevan.

    Minister Movsisian said Armenia’s energy infrastructure is mostly ready to start supplying electricity to Turkey but added that some work still needs to be done by the Turkish party before the deliveries can begin.

    “The lines on our side are mainly ready. We only have to do an overall check. The Turkish party has asked for four months to complete their part of the work, after which we will start electricity supplies for a few days experimentally and then on a regular basis,” Movsisian said, adding that electricity supplies are expected to be on a year-round basis rather than have a seasonal nature.

    “It is a long-term and quite a serious program,” Movsisian said. “I can not say what part of Turkey will the imported electricity be used for, but since Turkey experiences a shortage of electricity, the volume of supply will be quite sizable, and I think it will tremendously ease their problems.”

    According to Movsisian, the price of supplied electricity will be economically effective and will depend on thermal energy and gas prices. According to current estimates, it may make 5.7 cents per kilowatt.

    Armenian Nuclear Power Plant Director-General Gagik Markosian also considers the deal to be lucrative.

    “I think it is very lucrative as an energy project. As all know, Armenia has a lot of untapped capacities and this potential that we have is not being used either,” Markosian said. “We have stations, specialists, personnel. And in all cases, exporting electricity is a very profitable deal for Armenia.”

    The nuclear station in Metsamor currently produces an average of 2.5 billion kilowatt per hour of electricity a year, according to its head manager.

    Markosian says the preliminarily agreed volume of annual electric power supplies to Turkey estimated at 1.5 billion kilowatt/hour with a possibility to grow up to 3.5 billion is a “very serious figure.”

  • Turkey talks Black Sea oil with RWE, Chevron-source

    Turkey talks Black Sea oil with RWE, Chevron-source

    By Orhan Coskun and Thomas GroveISTANBUL, Aug 29 (Reuters) – Turkey is holding talks with Germany’s RWE AG (RWEG.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) and U.S. Chevron (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on conducting oil exploration in the Black Sea, a senior Turkish energy ministry source told Reuters on Friday.

    Major oil importer Turkey is looking to develop its oil exploration activities as part of efforts to reduce its large fuel bill.

    The source said Turkish oil company TPAO planned to open six wells in the Black Sea, of which two will be opened with Brazil’s Petrobras.

    “Talks with U.S. Chevron are continuing. These talks have reached an important stage. A partnership may also be established with RWE for some licenses belonging to TPAO,” the source said on the sidelines of an energy conference in Istanbul.

    “There are indications that the Black Sea could be an oil production region like the Caspian. We are expecting good news from the exploration there in 2009,” Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said at the same conference.

    Mehmet Uysal, general director of TPAO, said earlier this year the company would start oil exploration in the Black Sea with Brazil’s Petrobras next year.

    Read the full story…

  • Iran says new oil and gas deals more attractive

    Iran says new oil and gas deals more attractive

    TEHRAN, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Iran’s revised oil and gas development contracts offer more incentives to foreign firms and Turkey’s reservations about the deals reflect an initial lack of knowledge, the Iranian oil minister said on Monday.

    A Turkish Energy Ministry source said last week Turkey would not sign a natural gas accord with Iran until changes acceptable to global investors were made to so-called “buy-back” deals, which are often criticised by foreign firms.

    The gas deal was expected to have been signed when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Turkey earlier in August.

    “The Oil Ministry’s international agreements have made good progress. The modification of the buy-back contracts provides more incentives for foreign companies to participate in Iranian projects,” Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said.

    He did not give details.

    “The Turks were not informed about the culture of the buy-back contracts. But with the negotiations that took place there (in Turkey), they were told the price ceiling of the contract is determined after carrying out tenders,” he said.

    His comments were made to journalists, according to the Oil Ministry’s news website SHANA.

    Turkey and Iran last year signed a preliminary accord on joint gas production and export under which Iranian gas would be exported to Europe through Turkey and Turkey would produce 20.4 billion cubic metres of natural gas in the South Pars gas field.

    The United States, which is seeking to isolate Iran in a row over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, has opposed the deal.

    The Turkish ministry source said the proposed buy-back system created “serious risks” for Turkey in terms of pricing. Turkey wants to buy gas directly from the fields and wants Iran to give a guarantee on contributing towards investments.

    Under such buy-backs, firms generally hand over operations of fields to Iran after development and receive payment from oil or gas production for a few years to cover their investment.

    Iran says it is revising terms but has not given details.

    The Turkish source said the risks linked to the buy-back system included issues such as commodity price rises, financing costs, the lack of a production guarantee and insurance costs.

    Nozari dismissed the idea of production sharing deals, a form of oil contract found elsewhere. “Such contracts have been abolished in the world and less than 10 percent of oil production is done using this mode of contract,” he said.

    An Iranian oil official told Reuters this month Iran was negotiating a deal with Asian oil firms for two oil and gas blocks in the Caspian Sea and this could involve a production sharing contract, if parliament and the authorities agreed that the model was best for the high-cost Caspian area.

    Iran says a study has shown Iran’s Caspian region contains an estimated 21 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent.

    “A number of wells have been drilled in the shallow parts of the Caspian Sea in order to determine commerciality but we have not received a definitive answer on that,” Nozari said, adding that seismological tests were also going ahead. (Reporting by Hashem Kalantari, writing by Edmund Blair)

  • Turkish-Iranian energy ties deepen

    Turkish-Iranian energy ties deepen

    By JOHN C.K. DALY, UPI International Correspondent 

    Published: Aug. 21, 2008 at 5:52 PM

    WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (UPI) — The repercussions of Russia’s reassertion of power within what it deems its “sphere of influence” in “the near abroad” continue to ripple throughout Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Washington’s increasingly strident rhetoric over the Russian-Georgian conflict over South Ossetia is having repercussions from Prague through Warsaw to Kiev, as governments scramble to assess the fallout from the dispute.

    Edging closer into Washington’s orbit, Poland has agreed to base 10 U.S. anti-ballistic interceptor missiles and the Czech Republic its complementary radar facility by 2011-2013 to complete a system with components already situated in the United States, Greenland and Britain. While the Bush administration avers that the system is designed to intercept rogue missile launches from renegade states such as Iran, the Kremlin fiercely maintains that geography alone plainly shows the system’s anti-Russian intent and that, along with incorporating former Eastern European and former Soviet republics within NATO, it is an American-led attempt to encircle Russia.

    Even more infuriating to Moscow, earlier this week Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, following Russia’s unilateral abrogation earlier this year of a 1992 agreement with Ukraine on the use of Ukraine’s two Soviet-era missile early warning system tracking stations, issued a decree ending Ukrainian participation in the accord and made an offer of the two stations for “active cooperation with European nations.”

    If Eastern Europe has been traumatized by the recent display of Russia’s military might, with Ukraine and Georgia seeing possible NATO membership as the surest guarantor of their security further east, another stalwart NATO member is carefully evaluating Russia’s other rising influence — energy. As Turkey re-evaluates Eurasia’s changing political and economic landscape, Washington in its eagerness to confront Russia may see another of its cherished foreign policy tenets, that of blockading Iran with sanctions, weakened, perhaps fatally.

    Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, it has been a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran, currently enshrined in the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Expanding Washington’s reach, ILSA threatened even non-U.S. countries and companies with possible sanctions if they invested more than $20 million in developing Iran’s energy resources.

    For Turkey, which imports 90 percent of its energy supply, the Washington dictum of “happiness is multiple pipelines” is a stark reality, however much Washington loathes the mullahcracy in Tehran. Turkey does not have the luxury of allowing “pipeline politics” to trump its national energy security policies, as its current choice of major natural gas suppliers is stark — Russia or Iran, while waiting for Azerbaijan to ramp up production. Highlighting the vulnerability of regional pipelines to conflict, the fighting in South Ossetia halted Azeri oil shipments through Georgia.

    Iran, which contains the world’s second-largest gas reserves, currently provides nearly one-third of Turkey ‘s domestic demand, while Russian energy giant Gazprom provides 63.7 percent of Turkey’s imports, primarily via the Black Sea undersea Blue Stream pipeline, with smaller volumes coming from Azerbaijan. Much to Washington’s annoyance, in 1996 Turkey signed a contract with Iran for natural gas deliveries, which began in December 2001 via a pipeline from Tabriz to Ankara. Five years later the South Caucasus pipeline, also known as the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline, opened; with an annual capacity of 8.8 billion cubic meters, BTE carries Azeri Caspian natural gas to Turkey via Georgia.

    In June Turkey’s Devlet Planlama Teskilati (State Planning Organization) prepared a comprehensive projection for Turkey’s economy covering 2009-2011, which included measures to ensure Turkey’s long-term energy supply security and accorded top priority to decreasing Turkey’s dependency on imported natural gas. In the interim, however, given the vulnerability of Azeri imports because of the unsettled nature of current Georgian-Russian relations and the apparent unpredictability of the Kremlin, Ankara is deepening its ties with Tehran, however much Washington disapproves. On July 29 Iranian Petroleum Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said in Tehran that Turkey and Iran are negotiating over Turkey being a transit corridor for Iranian natural gas exports to Europe and that Iran will provide increased amounts of natural gas to Turkey during the winter.

    Nor is Turkey limiting its interest in Iranian energy purely to transit policies: In July 2007 Ankara signed a deal with Iran to develop three gas projects in its giant South Pars offshore gas field in the Persian Gulf as well as to build two pipelines to transport an estimated 30 billion cubic meters of Iranian and Turkmen gas annually through Turkey for resale to Europe. The 3,745-square-mile Persian Gulf South Pars-North Dome gas condensate field, straddling Iranian and Qatari territorial waters, is the world’s largest gas field, containing an estimated 51 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, 50 billion barrels of condensate and reserves equivalent to 360 billion barrels of oil.

    The next result of such activity has been a rapid increase in bilateral trade; in 2007 bilateral Turkish-Iranian trade exceeded $8 billion, a 19.5-percent increase over 2006.

    In case Washington was inclined to shake its sanctions stick at Ankara in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two-day visit to Turkey last week, Turkish President Abdullah Gul hailed the visit as “fruitful and helpful” and added, “Expansion of relations on a regional level seems quite natural for Turkey, and it is not important what other states think of it; Turkey cares for its own interests. Turkey will establish good ties with its neighbors with an aim of stability and security in the region.” Underlining Turkey’s commitment to improving its energy ties with Iran, Turkish Energy Minister Hilmi Guler will pay a return visit to Iran within the next two weeks.

    Gul tersely summed up Ankara’s concerns in his closing remarks: “We are an independent country. Here we eye our country’s interests. … We have to make investments for the (energy) supply security of Turkey.” In the 21st century, keeping your electorate warm trumps alliance politics every time.

  • Window on Eurasia: Moscow Expert Admits Russian Interest in Blocking Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline

    Window on Eurasia: Moscow Expert Admits Russian Interest in Blocking Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline

    Monday, August 18, 2008

     Paul Goble

    Vienna, August 18 – A leading Moscow State University expert on the post-Soviet states argues that the Russian Federation’s main goals in Georgia did not include blocking the flow of oil through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, but she says that “the possibility cannot be excluded” that Moscow was pursuing “other goals” including that.
    In an interview to MGU’s Information-Analytic Center on the CIS countries, Natalya Kharitonova, the general director of that body, said that “considering the love” Russian and Western experts have for focusing on energy issues, “one ought to have expected” that there would be a discussion of oil in the Georgian conflict (www.ia-centr.ru/expert/1989/).
    Many experts, she points out, connected the August 6 PKK attack on the pipeline which stopped the flow of oil and the beginning of the military conflict, with some of them implying if not saying outright that either the one led to the other or that the two together were part of a general plan to force Azerbaijan to seek alternative routes for the export of its oil.
    “Baku, forced to significantly reduce the pumping of oil, immediately stopped using the Baku-Batumi and Baku-Kulevi rail lines again in connect with military actions in Georgia.” The Baku-Supsa line had already been stopped for “technical reasons,” Kharitonova says, but “in official versions are being invoked almost exclusively political reasons.”
    Now as a result, Azerbaijani hydrocarbons are flowing through Russian territory on the Baku-Novorossiisk line, but because Baku can export only 7 to 8 percent as much via this pipeline as via Baku-Ceyhan, she added, “Turkey intends to buy additional supplies from Russia and Iran” to compensate.
    Not surprisingly, given the impact all this is having on both the economic well-being and geopolitical relations in the region, the Moscow scholar says, Tbilisi has accused the Russian government of planning to disrupt such flows as part of its military effort, although such suggestions have been dismissed by Russian and Western specialists.
    But now other explanations are springing up. Some, Kharitonova notes, are saying that the disruption was the “work of Georgian provocateurs” who were looking for something to blame Russia that would attract the attention of the West, while others are saying this is yet another effort to disrupt the NABUCCO program.
    Most of those making these suggestions, however, offer little or no evidence to back up their claims, but the Moscow specialist points out that there are two obvious things going on. On the one hand, Iran is getting more active and is now talking about building a Neka-Dzhask pipeline to compete with Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and thereby increase Tehran’s influence.
    And on the other, Russia has two clear motives for an interest in the stopping of the BTC pipeline. First of all, it has never wanted to see the construction and operation of oil and gas pipelines that bypass Russian territory. And second, it has an interest in “forcing Western countries to put pressure on Georgia” to draw back so that the oil can flow.
    “There are a large number of versions” of why this has happened, Kharitonova notes, and she “suggests that one ought not to ignore any of them,” although she adds that it would be a mistake to fail to see that what has happened in Georgia and with the BTC may be nothing more than “a simple coincidence.”
    But she ends by acknowledging that “there are too many interests” intersecting in this part of the world to ignore the ways in which those who produce oil, those who transport it and those who consume it are in geopolitical competition. Indeed, she says, it is time to talk about “geo-economics” when it comes to oil, gas and politics in the Caucasus.