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Turkmenistan Freezes Iran
The gas strife of Iran and Turkmenistan triggered by the halt of supplies from New Year is progressing into a gas war in the Middle East. Turkmenistan announced it wouldn’t resume deliveries and Teheran responded by threatening to go to the international courts. People in Russia’s Foreign Ministry say the conflict roots in Turkmenistan’s desire to speed up division of the Caspian shelf and the analysts speculate that Russia will benefit from the clashes in the end.
Turkmenistan cut off the supplies to Iran on January 1. The matter at stake is roughly 8 million cu meters a day. Iran exports gas to Turkey, which forwards it to Greece, so the halt broke the schedule of those deliveries and Gazprom had to step in to make up for the shortage.
Under the contract that Turkey and Iran sealed in 1996, the latter is to daily ship 27 million cu meters to 28 million cu meters of gas. But Iran violated the contract in the second half of December, having trimmed the supplies to between 4 million cu meters and 5 million cu meters. It completely halted the export January 7. Turkey announced it wasn’t to be blamed for the breach of the international obligations and Iran pointed to Turkmenistan as the cause of the troubles.
Turkmenistan responded January 13, saying Teheran breached paying commitments, including for the fourth quarter, which delays rebuilding and maintenance of the pipeline. Official Iran declared that all payments have been effected and the ones terminated for some short time are being executed. Of-the-record, one of the bureaucrats in Teheran explained that deliveries stopped as Ashgabat proposed to hike the purchasing price from $75/ths sq meters to $140/ths sq meters from January 1.
According to Russia’s analysts, Turkmenistan pressurizes for raising the gas price to the level of Russia, i.e. to $140 on average in 2008. But Russia will win if the price for Iran is hiked in the end. Having breached two long-term contracts with Russia and Iran, Ashgabat would hardly sell gas to China at $90, i.e. Gazprom has an extra chance to talk China into making a contract that appears more stable than the deal clinched with Turkmenistan.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 16, 2008
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