Prime Minister Ponta Tours Central Asia

The energy sector remains high on Prime Minister Victor Pontas agenda for his tour of Central Asia.

România Internațional, 28.06.2013, 12:57

Considering their vulnerability in the field of energy security, EU Member States are now striving to find alternative energy sources. Romania has long been among the top contenders in the race, bled out by the high prices it pays for Russian gas imports.

Although in the past years domestic output has covered some of the internal consumption, Romania has been separately trying to curb its dependency on natural gas imported from the Russian energy company Gazprom, just like many other Member States. Asia, the Caspian Sea area in particular, is quite appealing when it comes to energy resources. For this reason, Prime Minister Victor Ponta has paid a series of strategic visits to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Coincidence or not, Ponta landed in the capital city Baku the very moment when the much-advertised and EU-backed Nabucco project, of which Romania was an active partner, was cold-shouldered by the international consortium operating natural gas exploitation in Azerbaijan. Therefore the Consortium ruled out the Nabucco pipeline, originally designed to carry gas from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.

After that great deal of preliminary steps aimed at sorting out legal and financial provisions and despite having been dealt a losing hand, Romania still has one ace up its sleeve in the energy game in Azerbaijan,. The Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector (also known in short as AGRI) is a project aimed at transporting gas natural gas extracted in Azerbaijan via Georgia to Romania and subsequently to EU markets. Among other things, the project provides for the construction of regasification terminals in Romania. Aside from AGRI, the agenda of talks with the Azeri president Ilham Aliyev focused on possible investments that the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) might make in Romania. Ponta talked about our country’s largest petrochemical works, Oltchim Ramnicu Valcea, which has seen several privatization attempts so far, as a potential investment target for the Azeri State Oil Company.

During his visit to Kazakhstan, Prime Minister Ponta put forth the idea of linking Kazakhstan’s and Romania’s gas networks by means of extending the South Stream pipeline from neighboring Bulgaria. The only problem is the long road from talk to implementation, a case in point being the recent failure of the much-debated Nabucco project.