Unocal Corp., Saudia Arabia's Delta Oil Co., and the governments of Pakistan and Turkmenistan have signed a framework agreement setting the stage for construction of a $2-2.5 billion natural gas pipeline between the two central Asian countries.
The 1,600-km, 48-in. line would initially deliver 1 bcfd of gas from Turkmenistan gas fields to Pakistan by 2001. Under the preliminary agreement, construction would get under way by December 1998.
The accord's signatories agreed to settle by Sept. 15 on a price for the gas to be exported and to set up a formal group to oversee the project by October.
Signing the agreement, after lengthy talks, were the deputy premier and oil minister of Turkmenistan, Batir Sarjaev; Pakistan's federal minister for petroleum and natural resources, Nisar Ali Khan; and representatives of Unocal and Delta.
The Turkmenistan-Pakistan pipe-line project is as problematic as any energy project in the world today, fraught with a dizzying array of geopolitical concerns.
The pipeline would traverse Afghanistan, currently gripped by a vicious civil war, and ultimately would extend to India, which has been bitterly feuding with Pakistan for generations, although tensions have eased of late.
Thrown into the mix is Pakistan's alleged support of Afghanistan's Taliban faction-which Karachi denies-set against purported support of anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan by Russia and Iran.
The latter two countries worry about the Taliban's brand of rigidly fundamentalist Islamic governance getting exported to the largely Muslim former Soviet states of central Asia. Of equal concern to them are the prospects for a route for exports of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea that would pose an alternative to export routes via Iran or Russia. Iran has proposed its own gas pipeline to India, a $2 billion, 1,200-mile project.
Meanwhile, the largely Muslim central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union are campaigning hard to attract foreign investment to their hugely prospective oil and gas sector while at the same time seeking to end total dependence on Russia's oil and gas pipeline infrastructure for energy exports (see related article, p. 20).
The one uncertainty in all of this, as Unocal has made clear, is that no construction will take place unless stability comes to Afghanistan-financing would be otherwise impossible. Earlier plans to start work on the project this fall were postponed when the civil war heated up again this past spring.
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