On January 13 in Baku, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso signed a declaration on developing the Southern Gas Corridor to Europe. On January 14-15 in Ashgabat, Barroso and EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger conferred with President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov on... MORE

The Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI) is a project of the Milano-based Edison with Depa, the Greek state-controlled gas transmission and trading company. ITGI proposes to carry 10 to 12 billion cubic meters (bcm) of “Caspian” gas per year, including 8 bcm to Italy and the remainder... MORE

A contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas has developed between three gas transport and trading projects: Nabucco, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI), and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP, geographically a continuation of the Turkish pipeline route into Greece, heading for Italy). All three are component projects... MORE

Stakeholders in Nabucco and other Southern Corridor pipeline consortiums, as well as Shah Deniz project stakeholders in Azerbaijan, the European Commission, and many observers consider that investment decisions are a must in the first half of 2011.If finalized at this juncture, the investment decisions would... MORE

The European Commission’s President, Jose Manuel Barroso, and EU Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, are starting on January 13 an unprecedented joint visit to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. They are responding to Turkmenistan’s recent positive signals about supplies for the EU’s Nabucco transport project, but also to... MORE

Moldova’s Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has won a new, and potentially longer, lease on life, after 16 months of insecure governance (EDM, January 7). Its post-election government is due to be installed on January 14. The AEI’s success, however hard-won, shows the European Union’s... MORE

After almost four years of construction, the Oguz-Gabala-Baku water pipeline was inaugurated on December 28, 2010. Costing almost $1 billion, the pipeline is already termed by many in Azerbaijan as the “second BTC,” referring to the strategically important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline built a decade ago to... MORE

The prospects for resolving the Karabakh conflict are as uncertain as ever after the inability of Armenia and Azerbaijan’s presidents to reach any tangible agreements on the margins of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Astana on December 1-2. It... MORE

International attention focused on Astana on December 1-2, where the leaders of the 56 member-countries gathered for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit, billed by the Kazakh government as an “epoch-making event.” Kazakhstan ended its chairmanship of the organization in a... MORE

The US Embassy’s February 25, 2010 report from Baku opens an almost panoramic view on the current state of the bilateral relationship (https://cablegate.wikileaks.org). Two aspects stand out in this comprehensive account of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s discussion with the visiting US Under-Secretary of State William... MORE