SPEAKING
FREELY Iran's Islamic pipeline a mad man's
dream By Mansour Kashfi
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.Please
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The Islamic Republic
of Iran, after encountering frequent
disqualification in its efforts to be a reliable
partner in the international arena, specifically
in oil, gas and pipeline transactions, is now
entering a fresh game in delivering natural gas to
Europe, in spite of the heavy sanctions imposed by
the United Nations, United States, and European
Union.
Only this time around it is trying
to team up with the Islamic Arab states, bypassing
its old trade partner Turkey. However, the
ultimate goal still is the same - delivering
Iranian natural gas via
pipeline to Europe, a
dream that has frequent failing records.
A
memorandum of understanding was signed between the
Iran and Turkey in July 2007 to transfer Iranian
and Turkmen gas to Europe via Turkey. At that time
the Iranian minister of petroleum, Qolamhosein
Nozari, told reporters that "deliberations would
be held in the coming weeks on management of the
South Pars natural gas region and transportation
of Iranian gas to Europe via Turkey."
According to the accord, Turkey would have
produced 20.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of
natural gas in the South Pars gas field with an
investment of US$3.5 billion.
Later, Akbar
Turkan, head of Oil Ministry Planning, in October
2008 told the ministry website Shana that Iran
plans to build a "Persian Pipeline" for shipping
its natural gas through Turkey to Europe that
would be independent of the proposed EU-backed
Nabucco Project.
However, none of the
aforementioned aspirations materialized; instead,
within the last couple of years, the international
pressures on Iran have tremendously increased.
Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia have
joined the US and EU collectively to enforce smart
and effective sanctions on Iran. Further, the dawn
of the Arab Spring has begun to shape the
geopolitics of the region.
And Turkey,
which has considered itself a close strategic
partner with Iran in controlling the Kurdish
uprising for the past three decades, is now
breaking away and getting closer to its big
brother in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), as well as seeking membership
in the European Union. As recently as September 1
last year, the Turkish government ceased its
opposition toward the deployment of an early
warning radar system against Iran, advocated by
the US and approved by NATO in a summit in Lisbon.
The resulting divergence between a Sunni
Turkey and a Shia Iran has crystallized in their
attitude and behavior toward the Syrian crisis. At
one end of the spectrum is Iran, a very dear
friend and advocate of Bashar al-Assad, the
troubled Syrian dictator. At the opposite end is
Turkey, which condemns Assad for murdering his own
people. All these new developments between Iran
and Turkey have manifested in the form of frequent
explosions of the gas pipeline that carries
Iranian natural gas to Turkey.
Despite all
of this, and still believing it is in the game,
Iran has a new plan for transporting natural gas
to Europe. On July 24, 2011, Javad Owji, deputy
oil minister and chairman of the Iranian National
Gas Co, told the local media that "Iran's gas
exports to Europe are sustainable and enjoy a
secure future."
He continued that Iran has
the capability to produce 600 million cubic meters
(mcm) of gas daily, and by launching the South
Pars gas field and completing the 24 projected
phases in the future, Iran will be able to produce
1.2 bcm and to export up to 250 mcm daily. The
following day a memorandum of understanding was
signed between the deputy Iranian oil minister,
Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi, and Syrian
Oil Minister Sufian Alao in the southern Iranian
port of Assalouyeh, Iran's gas hub, for the
construction of a pipeline dubbed as the "Islamic
Gas Pipeline" to deliver Iran's natural gas to
Lebanon after passing through Iraq and Syria, and
then submerging beneath the Mediterranean before
surfacing in Greece, the EU's first transit
country.
Owji emphasized that the
construction of this pipeline stretching for
several thousand kilometers will take three to
five years once an investment "around $10 billion"
is secured. He further added that this agreement
is indicative that the West's sanctions on Iran
have been totally ineffective.
Iranian
Mehr News Agency, on August 10, 2011, reported
that Owji told reporters in Tehran: "Seven
international investors have announced their
readiness to finance, design, and construct the
Islamic pipeline that will transport 110 million
cm of Iranian natural gas to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
and European countries per day." Owji added that
talks were underway to begin construction of the
multibillion-dollar project by March 2012.
Incredibly, Iran has a tendency to forget
that the country has been subject not only to
sanctions by the UN and EU but also to very
effective US sanctions since the Islamic
revolution of 1979, placing Iran directly in
confrontation with Washington, a situation created
by the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran.
Although the authorities in Iran have
continuously maintained that the US-led sanctions
have not caused even a dent on their economy, the
fact is the effect of sanctions has been extremely
noticeable in the Iranian oil and gas industry,
where the lack of Western investment and modern
technology have extremely dampened Iran's ability
to increase oil and gas output.
Western -
noticeably American and recently European -
sanctions against Iran have been closing in from
all different angles, the most detrimental of
which was the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline,
which was prohibited from entering Iran. Carrying
about one million barrels of Azeri crude oil per
day to the Turkish-Mediterranean terminal via
Georgia, this pipeline was originally intended to
pump from northern Iran to a port in the Persian
Gulf passing through Iranian soil. However, Iran
was deprived of this privilege due to the
existence of a totalitarian regime in Iran, which
led the West, the pipeline sponsor, to change the
route of the pipeline.
Next, the
well-publicized Nabucco natural gas pipeline is
being designed to carry natural gas from the
Central Asia and Caspian regions to the lucrative
markets of Europe, traversing the Republic of
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Romania and entering Austria. Once again, however,
due to the suppressive and irresponsible regime in
Tehran, Iran and its huge volume of gas was
intentionally excluded from the project.
Furthermore, there is the demise of the
grandiosely named "Peace Gas Pipeline". Iran, in
close proximity to India, is already a major oil
supplier to India and has the potential to be a
gas exporter to that country as well. Iran had
offered to sell gas to India at the Iran-Pakistani
border. The 2,600 km pipeline was to carry gas
from the "Assalouyeh Energy Zone" in southern Iran
to Pakistan and India and was first mooted in
1994.
The proposed pipeline would have
initially carried 60 million cm of gas a day from
the Iranian South Pars gas field to split equally
between Pakistan and India - and makes perfect
economic sense. Given the huge gas reserves of
Iran for many years to come, such a project would
have provided reassurance of excellent income for
the country for the foreseeable future.
The pipeline, however, was a target of US
opposition. The George W Bush administration
feared that the plan would direct precious new
revenues into the Iranian economy, potentially
weakening efforts to isolate Iran and its
clandestine nuclear weapons program. Therefore,
Nicholas Burns, the former undersecretary of state
for political affairs and the US negotiator for
the controversial nuclear deal with India, forbade
India from concluding any long-term oil and gas
agreement with Iran or face the prospect that the
Indian nuclear deal with Washington would go into
cold storage.
Ostensibly, the democratic
world is not permitting a medieval regime, however
rich in oil and gas, whose mission is to destroy
civilized society, to be a regional economic
player. Therefore, the materialization of a $10
billion investment in a 5,600 km Islamic pipeline
from Iran with a despised and precarious
government, to Iraq with a myriad of rival
ideological factions, to Syria-assuming Bashar al
Assad survives his people's uprising-and finally
to Lebanon, a fragile state at best, would be a
mad man's dream.
Mansour Kashfi,
PhD, is president of Kashex International
Petroleum Consulting, Dallas, Texas and the author
of more than 100 articles about petroleum geology
worldwide. mkashfi@tx.rr.com
(Copyright 2012 Mansour Kashfi.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click here if you are interested in
contributing.
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