LNG

Azerbaijan, the Central Asian nation and former Soviet republic, has issued its quarterly natural gas pipeline export data that affects LNG requirements in Southern Europe.

European natural gas and LNG prices have spiked because of the ethnic cleansing crisis facing Armenians in the South Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union and the European Union has been urged by French and Dutch politicians and others to end the gas supply agreement with Azerbaijan with the existing and new volumes aimed at southern Europe amid concerns the deal for increased supplies cannot be delivered anyway by 2027.

Sept 26 (LNGJ) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his Azerbaijan counterpart Ilham Aliyev have attended a ground-breaking ceremony for a new natural gas pipeline that will run from Turkey’s eastern province of Igdir to Sederek in western Azerbaijan. “The Igdir-Nakhchevan gas pipeline project we have launched will further strengthen our cooperation with Azerbaijan in the energy sector and will also contribute to the supply of gas to Europe,” Erdogan said.

   Analysts note that after Azerbaijan’s military offensive in the past week regained control of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenians, another dispute is looming with Armenia over the territory of Nakhchevan where the new pipeline will run. Like Nagorno-Karabakh, where the Armenian population has been isolated in their enclave from the country of Armenia, the Nakhchevan autonomous region of Azerbaijan borders Armenia on two sides and is 450 kilometres (280 miles) west of the Azerbaijan capital Baku.

The European Union may face pipeline natural gas supply issues again this winter because of a military conflict, this time by Azerbaijan against the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.