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The Pipeline Guardians: NATO, SCO
By Kostis Geropoulos
01/09/08 "New
Europe News" --
US Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to begin a trip on
September 2 to Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, a move that is
likely to irritate leaders in Moscow, who have condemned the
United States for siding with Georgia in the South Ossetian
conflict. And that’s exactly what Cheney does best. He irritates
the Kremlin.
During a trip to Lithuania in May 2006, Cheney accused Russia of
“unfairly and improperly” restricting the rights of its people,
and of using oil and gas as “tools of intimidation or blackmail”
against its neighbours.
It is not yet clear to what extent will Cheney push to get
Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Nevertheless, energy has become
an issue of strategic discussions at the Western defence
alliance. At recent NATO summits, Washington sought to commit
NATO to energy security activities, calling for NATO to guard
pipelines and sea lanes. This means NATO members would risk
being drawn into long-term military commitments relating to
energy.
Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met his Chinese
counterpart Hu Jintao and the leaders of four ex-Soviet Central
Asian nations in Tajikistan in the framework of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO). Formed in 2001 as a
counterweight to NATO’s growing influence in the region, the SCO
was recently dubbed the anti-NATO alliance by the Russian press.
The SCO plans to develop energy cooperation: either through
creating an energy club or working out the organization’s energy
strategy. According to earlier reports, Russia supports the idea
of establishing an energy club, while the idea of an energy
strategy is backed by the Kazakh side. Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad whose country holds observer status in the club and
holds enormous oil and gas reserves, attended the SCO summit.
Washington has long hoped that the energy-rich Caspian region
would help reduce Iran’s role in the global oil market,
diversify supplies away from Russia, and provide an alternative
to Saudi Arabian oil. “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a
region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant
as the Caspian,” then-Halliburton CEO Cheney said in 1998.
Cheney’s itinerary this week was not left to chance. Azerbaijan
is a key supplier of oil and gas to the West while Ukraine and
Georgia are main energy transit countries.
Viacheslav Kniazhnytskyi, energy counsellor of the Mission of
Ukraine to the EU claimed “that the energy was exactly the thing
that was behind this war masterminded by Russia.” He noted that
Russia immediately proposed Azerbaijan to reroute its oil to
Novorossiysk. “If it happens so it would mean that Azerbaijan
has no alternative but to submit itself to Gazprom monopoly,” he
told New Europe in an e-mail.
But Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin told New
Europe from Moscow that Azerbaijan cannot replace the Baku-
Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. “Even if it uses pipeline going
through Russia to Novorossiysk it is not enough in terms of
volume to replace one million barrels per day pipeline BTC,” he
said. But, he noted that the reliability of Georgia as an energy
transit country was dealt a devastating blow following the
recent conflict.
“It fuelled quite a discussion—who is to blame in this
situation? There is no common opinion on this part, but still at
the same time Georgia might be seen in the eyes of some
potential investor as not a reliable partner because it was
involved in military action first, and second, several
pipelines, which are going through the territory of this little
state, were shut down simultaneously. This is a major concern,
whether the country is reliable enough to invest in its
infrastructure,” Batunin said.
Moscow did not plan to occupy Georgia and assume control of
transit pipeline routes, none of which suffered any damage. But
the conflict highlighted the potential vulnerability of an
energy transit corridor in a region that has become a bone of
contention for US-Russian energy interests and this benefits
Moscow!
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