"It's a good question, how long we are going to wait," Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev warned with regard to the Nabucco gas transport project during the World Economic Forum just held in Davos. As a potential large-scale producer with proven reserves of 2 trillion cubic... MORE

On January 23 in Bratislava, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Gazprom Vice-President Aleksandr Medvedev announced the intention to create a Slovak-Gazprom joint enterprise. Fico stated specifically that he wanted such an enterprise to compete against SPP (Slovensky plynarensky priemysel--Slovak Gas Industry), the joint company... MORE

The high-level conference in Budapest on the Nabucco gas project (see EDM, January 20, 22, 23, 27, 29) underscored a reality that seems to slip from the conceptual grasp of some influential West European circles. This reality is that diversification of supply sources and transport... MORE

On January 26 and 27 Hungary hosted a high-level policy conference on the Nabucco gas transport project, with participants encompassing the entire producer-transit-consumer chain from the Caspian basin to Europe, and with active involvement by the European Union for the first time. The event did... MORE

On January 22 President of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov paid a one-day visit to Baku. The issue on the agenda was obvious: diversification of the gas supply to the EU and making Caspian gas available to EU households. Discussions with President Ilham Aliyev were very useful;... MORE

The Nabucco gas transport project, whose stakeholders and institutional backers are holding a high-level meeting in Budapest on January 26 and 27, faces a unique window of opportunity in a reshaped strategic context (see EDM, January 6, 22). The meeting is being held in the... MORE

On January 20 Alexei Miller, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, made an amazing confession. He told Interfax that in late December 2008, when negotiations between Ukraine and Russia on a new gas supply contract broke down, the party largely responsible for this... MORE

Turkey is continuing to debate the construction of its first nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, Mersin. After the tender was launched in March 2008, 13 foreign and local companies purchased documents. All but one, however, failed to submit an offer, because they did not have... MORE

On January 23 in Tashkent, Presidents Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan firmed up bilateral agreements that strengthen Russia’s monopoly on Uzbek exports of natural gas. Their quid-pro-quo involves a steep increase in Gazprom’s purchase price for Uzbek gas in return for... MORE

Russian officials have insisted that the construction of the Eastern Siberia Pacific Oil Pipeline (ESPO) remains on track despite growing costs, crisis-related concerns, and doubts about the project's economic viability amid falling crude prices. Russia's pipeline monopoly Transneft conceded that the ESPO project faced significant... MORE