Europe expects Azerbaijani gas by 2019

/By AzerNews/

By Aynur Karimova

The European Commission expects gas from the Shah Deniz II gas field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea to be transported to Europe by the end of 2019.

"In March I attended the opening ceremony of the Trans-Anatolian natural gas pipeline, known as TANAP. We expect that by the end of 2019 TANAP will be transporting 16 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey and Europe from the Shah Deniz II gas field in Azerbaijan which contains one of the largest gas deposits in the world," Maros Sefcovic, the Vice-President for Energy Union, said in his speech at the Energy Infrastructure Forum in Copenhagen.

He also noted that the work on the Southern Gas Corridor is seeing progress.

The Southern Gas Corridor project envisages the transportation of the gas extracted at the giant Shah Deniz field in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea. Shah Deniz Stage 2 gas will make a 3,500 kilometer journey from the Caspian Sea into Europe. This requires upgrading the existing infrastructure and the development of a chain of new pipelines.

The existing South Caucasus Pipeline will be expanded with a new parallel pipeline across Azerbaijan and Georgia, while the Trans-Anatolian pipeline will transport Shah Deniz gas across Turkey to meet the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which will take gas through Greece and Albania into Italy.

The Southern Gas Corridor is set to change the energy map of the entire region, connecting gas supplies in the Caspian to markets in Europe for the very first time.

The first gas supplies through the corridor to Georgia and Turkey are given a target date of late 2018. Gas deliveries to Europe are expected just over a year after the first gas is produced offshore in Azerbaijan.

The Southern Gas Corridor pipeline system has been designed to be scalable to twice its initial capacity to accommodate additional gas supplies in the future.