Turkmenistan, Iran set to open new gas pipeline

[Robb]

Source: Business Week

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived Tuesday in energy-rich Turkmenistan to attend this week's opening of a new pipeline that will ensure a sharp increase in natural gas deliveries from the Central Asian nation.

Drawing on a gas field that has in the past been reserved for exports to Russia, the new 19-mile (30-kilometer) pipeline will eventually more than double annual pipeline capacity between Turkmenistan and Iran to 20 billion cubic meters.

When it is officially inaugurated Wednesday, the pipeline will be the second new energy route tapping into Central Asia's vast gas reserves to open in a month. The new energy export options will weaken Moscow's grip over the region's gas, while also dampening Western hopes of claiming a share of Turkmen energy exports.

A major China-bound gas export pipeline went into operation in December. Turkmen gas deliveries to China through the pipeline are expected to reach about 6 billion cubic meters next year and increase incrementally until reaching 40 billion cubic meters in 2015.

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9D1KIG00.htm

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This is the PR piece of what I've been ranting about lately. Don't confuse all this with the pipeline you think you know about -- this is something different, and is all about the Energy War and the China-led bloc being created that excludes Western interests. It's the non-humanitarian reason the U.S. supports protesters in Iran: destabilization. Iran has money, and is financing a railway system that will link Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Iran -- even before this pipe, Iran is Turkmenistan's biggest trading partner, $3 billion in 2009, half again more than '08.
A stable Iran will cement its ties with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan, which have all essentially signed with China as energy suppliers for the next 50 years. Bulgaria and Turkey are leaning in that direction as well.
This is the very real threat to the West that PNAC was meant to address, in its own twisted way.

[clear eye]

1. This is very important for us to know.

I futilely wish that the response from our gov't would be to start rebuilding us from the ground up as an industrial power. We would have to let empire go and concentrate our resources on redevelopment, instead of running around hysterically trying to beat countries militarily into allying w/ us and underwriting our pyramid-scheme economy. China got its power this way. The one thing they've done right, amidst their generally disastrous system, is to concentrate first on standing strong on their own two feet. I think they learned this the hard way as a result of European exploitation including flooding China w/ opium in the late 19th century. Will we ever learn?

[dipsydoodle]

2. Not sure about Azerbaijan

which is pro west helped by their most recent bent elections.