The last-named was agreed upon in May 11, 2007 by the presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Azerbaijan and a special envoy of the president of Kazakhstan.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was brought on line two years earlier in an inauguration attended by then US Energy Secretary Samuel Brodman and the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The presence of Kazakh officials at the two above events is significant because although the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline commences in Azerbaijan at the western end of the Caspian and ends at Turkey's Mediterranean coast, the successor to the 1994 "Contract of the Century" signed by major American and British government and oil company officials with Azerbaijan envisioned since its inception that oil from fellow Caspian nations Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan would be run under the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and be shipped further west and north.
As early as 1996 the US planned to import natural gas to Europe from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan through a submarine pipeline in order to circumvent Russia and Iran. The trans-Caspian gas pipeline would parallel its oil counterpart as the current Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum land natural gas pipeline does the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil one and would link up with the trans-Caspian submarine gas pipeline described at the beginning of this paragraph.
Part of this vast trans-continental corridor is the proposed Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway, the foundation of a much-touted "China to Great Britain" line.
The major NATO states, the US and EU members, are also working on the Nabucco pipeline, which is planned to transport natural gas from Turkey to Austria, via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. It will run from Erzurum in Turkey where the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline ends. Again the strategy is to circumvent Russia and Iran.
Furthermore, the West is pursuing a "strategic view to see the Arab Gas Pipeline, which links Syria to Egypt via Jordan, extended to Turkey and Iraq by some time this year. This, in turn, would link to the 30bcm-per year Nabucco pipeline, connecting the EU to new gas sources in the Caspian Sea and Middle East."
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Last year "EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs and External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner met representatives of the Mashreq countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), Iraq and Turkey on May 5 in Brussels to discuss the finalisation of the Trans-Arab gas pipeline, promote its role as a future supplier of the EU backed Nabucco project and encourage the full participation of Iraq in regional energy activities, including as a partner in the Trans-Arab project.
"The Trans-Arab pipeline, which currently runs from Egypt through Jordan to Syria, has a capacity of 10 bn cm per year. The pipeline, which will be interconnected with Turkey and Iraq by 2009, will provide a new transport route for gas resources from the Mashreq region to the EU."
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Recent discussions have included not only Egypt but Algeria as intended partners in this arrangement, which would extend the web of pipelines from the eastern extreme of the Caspian Sea to a nation that borders Morocco, on the Atlantic Ocean.
Wherever the oil and gas may originate - from the Western border of China to a few hundred kilometers distance from the Atlantic Ocean - they are to converge in Turkey and the South Caucasus. Though however indispensable a role Turkey plays, it is entirely dependent on Caspian Sea oil and gas being shipped through the Caucasus for its importance in grander schemes.
As a Greek analyst commented this past February, this elaborate energy nexus is anything other than a merely economic proposition:
"Making inroads into Central Asia to access the oil and natural gas resources in this region would give the US a strategic advantage in the Eurasian Corridor, and if Middle East oil was added to this mix, control of the direction of the world economy....The success of Washington's East European and Balkan-Caucasus-Central Asia strategies would have led to the encirclement of Russia, with a chain of military and economic links with countries stretching from the Baltic States and the former [Soviet Union] satellites in East Europe, via the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia, to the borders of China."
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This confirms revelatory admissions by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (and former Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy) Matthew Bryza last June that "Our goal is to develop a 'Southern Corridor' of energy infrastructure to transport Caspian and Iraqi oil and gas to Turkey and Europe" and, to transition to the war in South Asia, "The East-West Corridor we had been building from Turkey and the Black Sea through Georgia and Azerbaijan and across the Caspian became the strategic air corridor, and the lifeline into Afghanistan allowing the United States and our coalition partners to conduct Operation Enduring Freedom."
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If the inextricable connection between the fifteen-year development of energy and transportation corridors by NATO states from Europe to Central Asia and the current "reverse flow" (the expression used for the short-lived transit of Russia oil through the Odessa-Brody pipeline before Kiev's ever-obedient Western clients put a halt to it) of NATO men and materiel to Central Asia and to the Afghan-Pakistani war front still appears unsubstantiated, US Navy Captain Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for the US Transportation Command, in speaking of the new American administration's plans for the massive escalation of the greater Afghan war, has put doubts to rest in saying, "[O]ne route...could involve shipping supplies to a port in Georgia on the Black Sea. Supplies would then be moved overland through Georgia to Azerbaijan, by ship across the Caspian to Kazakhstan and then south through other Central Asian countries to Afghanistan.
"The routes already exist. The facilities already exist. What we're talking about is tapping into existing networks and using a variety of military and contractor commercial enterprises to facilitate the movement of materiel supply, non-lethal supplies and everything else that is needed in Afghanistan through these existing commercial routes."
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