This was stated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the International Conference «Central and South Asia: Regional Relations. Challenges and Opportunities », held in Uzbekistan.
- The idea to align the energy infrastructure of Central and South Asia is showing great promise.
- The EAEU is working to form a united electric power market.
- This process could be synchronised with power supply projects in Central and South Asia.
- Russian economic operators are making a weighty contribution to the strengthening of the energy sector in Central Asian states
- Let me single out in particular our cooperation in the peaceful use of atomic energy with Uzbekistan, where Central Asia’s first nuclear power plant project is being implemented.
- We are also interested in participating in the construction of new gas transportation facilities, including the TAPI gas pipeline
The pipeline’s design capacity is planned to be 33 billion m3 of gas per year, and the project’s cost - about $10 billion.
This project has huge potential for the economies of the region and for building interconnectivity between South Asia and Central Asia, not to mention for sustaining the efforts for Afghanistan’s rebuilding process.
However, the security of the pipeline and the project as a whole depend on the negotiations with Taliban (banned by Russia as a terrorist group).
In February, Turkmenistan invited a Taliban delegation to discuss the future of this pipeline.
Though the delegation led by Mullah Abdul Gani Baradar expressed support and promised to protect the project.
TAPI has long been hailed as a monumentally important project, solving not just Turkmenistan’s limited customer problem, but more importantly, bringing much-needed energy resources to South Asia – if it can ever be built.
