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Construction of the 56-inch, 2,050-mile pipeline, first proposed in 2002, is tentatively slated to begin next year and scheduled for completion by 2014. At a cost initially estimated at $11.4bn and rising, Nabucco will be the most expensive pipeline ever built, more than three times the cost of the 1,092-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. Raising such a significant sum in a time of global recession would be an article of faith at best.
Throughput deficit
Even assuming that Nabucco's supporters manage to assemble a coterie of deep-pocketed investors, the only promised current volume for Nabucco's proposed 31 billion cubic meters (bcm) annual throughput is Azerbaijan's future offshore Caspian Shah Deniz production, estimated at 8 bcm.
Even if Shah Deniz does end up supplying Nabucco, its currently promised throughput leaves a deficit of 23 bcm, leading to the question of exactly whose natural gas will Nabucco carry if SOCAR drops out, a worst case scenario requiring the Nabucco consortium to scrounge not 23 bcm, but all 31 bcm per annum, especially as Washington's geopolitics invalidate the participation of either Russia or Iran?
For those with knowledge of the energy history in the post-Soviet space, the 419-mile, $500 million Odessa-Brody oil pipeline, completed in 2001, provides a cautionary tale to building pipelines without throughput guarantees.
The Ukrainian government rashly built the self-financed line without foreign investment, stretching from its Black Sea port to the Polish border to provide Central Europe with oil despite not having firm commitments from a single oil producing nation for export throughputs. After the pipeline remained unused for three years, a reluctant Kiev was forced in 2004 to agree to transport Russian oil southwards in the opposite direction, for export from Odessa rather than northwards to Central European markets as originally envisaged.
Division of resources
Further complicating the picture are the differing proposed transit and pricing policies of the countries that Nabucco will pass through. The biggest geographical hurdle impacting the bottom line is the fact that, if as some Nabucco supporters aver, Turkmenistan can be persuaded to contribute natural gas, the seabed of the Caspian has yet to definitively be delineated amongst the sea's five riparian states.
The question remains unresolved 18 years after the implosion of the USSR dashed the 1920 and 1941 Soviet-Iranian bilateral treaties covering the issue of offshore waters. Building a pipeline across seabed whose ownership is in dispute will enrich maritime lawyers, but few others.
The issue of competing claims over Caspian national waters and seabed is hardly a pedantic exercise. In July 2001 Iran dispatched military aircraft and a warship to intimidate two Azerbaijani survey vessels contracted by BP to leave the Alov-Araz-Sharg field, a site that Azerbaijan claimed was well within its national sector, but disputed by Iran. It seems unlikely Russia and Iran would stand idly by as trans-Caspian sub-sea pipelines, which exclude them, are constructed.
Hopes of Turkmen gas filling Nabucco's gas deficits are yet more wishful thinking. Last month the Central Asia-China gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan's Caspian shore natural gas fields to Xinjiang was inaugurated in the presence Chinese President Hu Jintao, Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov.
Staff
