Russia's pipeline policy by other means

Washington Times:

Russia's military incursion into Georgia, a former Soviet republic, signals that it intends to play a much bigger role in the distribution of Central Asia's huge oil and gas reserves to European markets, analysts said Monday.

By increasing instability in the area, Russia has significantly raised the cost of oil and gas pipelines that are on the drawing board. Investors now will be less likely to spend the billions of dollars needed to complete the projects, the analysts said.

Georgia has two major pipelines — one for oil, another for natural gas — that transport petroleum from the energy-rich nations of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to European markets.

"The Russian bear is trying to choke the vital east-west energy arteries in the Caucasus, specifically the BTC oil pipeline and the gas pipeline," said Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, opened in 2006, transports 1 million barrels of oil each day from Baku, Azerbaijan, on the west coast of the Caspian Sea through Georgia's capital of Tbilisi to Ceyhan, Turkey, on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. From there, ships haul the oil to its final destination. This high-quality oil competes with Russian supplies in Western markets.

The South Caucasus gas pipeline, which runs parallel with the BTC oil pipeline through Georgia, travels from Baku to Erzurum, Turkey, where its gas is connected to Turkish grids delivering energy to Europe.

The major benefit of building the two pipelines across Georgia was the ability to bypass Russia and Iran.

In January 2006, Russia cut off gas shipments to Ukraine over a pricing dispute. The pipeline disruption curtailed gas deliveries to Western Europe, calling into question Russia's reliability as a resource provider.

Western governments also wanted to avoid Iran, which was deemed an unreliable partner because of its nuclear program, its theocratic government and international sanctions that have restricted Western investment there.

...

That is probably the non humanitarian reasons for Russian aggression in Georgia. The Russian should be challenged on this matter at the UN.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more