The leader of Turkmenistan on Wednesday touted growing energy ties with Iran and China but stayed silent on Europe’s proposed Nabucco pipeline aimed at breaking Russia’s grip on gas exports.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, in a written address at the opening of an annual conference in the capital Ashgabat, singled out ties with Tehran and Beijing while also praising a Turkmen-led pipeline project to India through neighboring Afghanistan.
Mention of cooperation with Europe, however, was notably absent from Berdymukhamedov’s annual address to the Oil and Gas Turkmenistan conference – closely watched as a bellwether for the opaque country’s thinking.
"Exporting natural gas to the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, our country keeps pipeline modernization activities at the centre of its attention," the statement said.
"Furthermore, alongside conducting negotiations on the construction of a gas pipeline in second direction to China, Turkmenistan spares no effort to launch construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline."
Turkmenistan, an isolated but resource-rich Central Asian state located on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, is thought to hold the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas.
Ashgabat has been working to diversify away from its reliance on Soviet-era pipelines through Russia since a pipeline explosion in 2009 ground exports of Turkmen gas to a halt and soured ties with the Kremlin.
At the height of the row with Russia last year, Berdymukhamedov pleased the crowd of mostly Western energy executives by throwing his weight behind the Nabucco pipeline project, a trans-Caspian pipeline to Europe aimed at breaking Moscow’s stranglehold on Central Asian energy exports.
But since then Ashgabat has opened a 7,000-km natural gas pipeline to energy-hungry China and boosted exports to neighboring Iran while progress on Nabucco has remained mired in diplomatic wrangling.
