Tokyo, 2 September, /AJMEDIA/
We led the process of changing the energy map of Eurasia, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said addressing the 48th edition of the international Cernobbio Forum, AJMEDIA reports.
“To talk about Azerbaijan’s role for energy security, I need to draw your attention to some historical moments. Our energy strategy had been divided into stages. At the first stage, just three years after restoration of our independence in 1994, we were the first country which invited major energy companies of the world to work in the Caspian Sea. And very soon, we became an exporter of oil to European market, primarily to Italy and Azerbaijan is number one oil supplier to Italy for many years. But, being a landlocked country, we needed to have export pipelines, so we led the process of changing the energy map of Eurasia, building two strategic oil pipelines, one to the Mediterranean port of Turkiye and another to the Black Sea port of Georgia, thus diversifying the energy supplies to the Black Sea market and the world market. The second stage of our energy strategy was development of huge gas fields. According to the information about the proven reserves of Azerbaijan, they are equal to 2,6 trillion cubic meters and Azerbaijan, for many years, already for more than 10 years, is a reliable supplier to the neighboring market. But, of course, taking into account the existing potential and our plans of investments in gas infrastructure, we needed to build a major gas supply pipeline, which was called by us the Southern Gas Corridor. The Southern Gas Corridor is an integrated pipeline system consisting of three pipelines – the South Caucasus pipeline, Trans-Anatolian (TANAP) and Trans-Adriatic (TAP), which ends here in Italy. This is a 3,500 kilometer very complicated technical infrastructure. It partly goes to cross high mountains and partly goes on the seabed. And the last day of 2020, on the 31st of December, the final part of that major project, TAP, was inaugurated. Since that time, for one year and a half, Azerbaijan became a supplier of natural gas to three European countries, apart from Turkiye and Georgia. 13,5 billion cubic meters of gas have been supplied to Europe for one and a half year, 11,7 billion out of that to Italy. And this year, we plan to increase the volume and we project to supply the Italian market with close to 10 billion cubic meters. Our total export will be more than 22 billion cubic meters and with the great potential to grow,” the head of state said.
