Iran-India energy cooperation opens new horizons
While the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline may sound the death knell to the Iran-Pakistan-India project, the Middle East to India Deepwater Pipeline may deliver Iranian gas to India through an undersea pipeline.
Last month, Turkmenistan began construction of an ambitious $7.6 billion pipeline to export natural gas to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan. The project, known as TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India), will supply 33 million cubic meters of gas per day to India through a 1,814-kilometer (1,127-mile) pipeline. If finished on schedule, it is slated to become operational by the end of 2019.
Some energy analysts see the long-delayed launch of TAPI as the death knell to the stalled Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) project, which — similar to TAPI — has seen years of planning and negotiations and was supposed to supply India with almost the same amount of natural gas per year.
Despite the failure of IPI, Iran’s ambition to export natural gas to the Indian subcontinent is alive and well. Indeed, in the same week that Turkmenistan announced the start of TAPI’s construction, Indian and Iranian officials resumed serious negotiations to jumpstart a giant project to export Iranian natural gas to Oman and India via an undersea pipeline. This development has been preceded by months of increasingly intense discussions.
In August, the chairman of the Confederation of India Industry’s northern region, Shreekant Somany, at a joint meeting with the Oman Chamber of Commerce, said that the undersea project with the Iranians should be expedited. Then, in November, the head of the National Iranian Gas Export Company, Alireza Kameli, told Iranian media that Tehran is in serious negotiations with New Delhi to construct such an Iran-India pipeline. Two weeks later, on Dec. 9, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met with his Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, at the Heart of Asia conference in Islamabad. The two discussed the possibility of expanding their countries’ mutual economic cooperation, particularly in regard to Iran exporting natural gas to India. Subsequently, on Dec. 28, the Iranian minister of economic affairs and finance met with Swaraj and signed a 73-article agreement to expand bilateral cooperation, and particularly in the field of energy.
