Peak Oil News - Sechin divides the Black Sea

Russia's Deputy Prime Minister and energy tsar, Igor Sechin, is attempting to divide the Black Sea with a stroke almost as dramatic as the biblical one with which Moses surprised the Pharaoh at the Red Sea.

If you believe the latter, the former may be credible, despite the refusal of Russian energy policymakers to clarify what they are doing and what they think the commercial logic of the move to be. For tanker operators, the move threatens to cancel the long-planned crude oil pipeline running from Burgas, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, to the Greek Aegean port of Alexandropouli. Instead, Sechin now appears to favor expansion of port capacity at Ceyhan, the Turkish eastern Mediterranean tanker terminal, which will be supplied for the first time with Russian crude. This is to be piped from a new terminal to be built at Samsun, on Turkey's Black Sea coast

So, instead of a tanker shuttle moving westward from Novorossiysk across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian resort city of Burgas, which has been the plan agreed with Bulgaria and Greece until now, Sechin's plan calls for a new southward tanker route to Samsun. Swept away also are plans for Bulgaria to become a hub for storage and shipment of Russian natural gas, along two arms of the proposed South Stream pipeline.

On October 19, at a meeting in Milan with Turkey's Minister of Economics, Taner Yildiz, Sechin announced the new Russian direction for South Stream through Turkish territorial waters. In addition, it was announced that he had agreed to supply Russian crude oil to a new pipeline across Turkey from Samsun to Ceyhan, which the Russian companies, Transneft and Stroytransgas, will help to build.

According to a Russian reporter granted special access to Sechin, the new scheme has been in negotiation with the Turks since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was in Ankara on August 6. Ahead of Sechin's arrival to meet Yildiz in Milan, Russian officials are reported to have been working out the new scheme, which, in the newspaper report at least, diverts the seabed route of South Stream under the Black Sea by up to 230 kilometers southward to Turkish territorial waters; replaces Bulgaria as Russia's energy transit partner for both oil and gas; and agrees to the Samsun-Ceyhan oil pipeline as a substitute for the Burgas-Alexandroupoli route.

Gazprom, Russia's leading company, has told Asia Times Online that the reports of Sechin's agreement with the Turkish government to reroute the South Stream gas pipeline onto Turkish territory do not mean that Gazprom has decided to lay a land segment of the pipeline in Turkey, and bypass Bulgaria altogether. But Gazprom is unwilling to rule that option out, or to say what it understands by the Sechin plan. The company's principal spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, is not answering questions, adding to the impression that his company's leadership is in disarray over Sechin's moves towards Turkey.