Posted on 10/07/2006 1:01:25 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Prime ministers from Russia, Bulgaria and Greece agreed Oct. 5 to construct an oil pipeline that will ship predominantly Russian oil transported by tanker across the Black Sea from a receiving port at Burgas, Bulgaria, to Alexandroupolis, Greece.
A great deal of Russian and Caspian crude oil ends up getting loaded onto tankers on the Black Sea, but the sea does not offer easy access to the wider oceans. To reach the Mediterranean, tankers first have to pass through the Turkish Straits, which are too small to accommodate anything but the smallest oil tankers and are certainly too tight a squeeze for supertankers, which generally are the only ships capable of efficiently delivering crude oil to distant destinations such as North America or East Asia.
But Burgas-Alexandroupolis will never happen.
One of the results of the Oct. 5 negotiations was that the Russians got a 51 percent stake in the project, to be spilt among three state-run companies: Transneft (the country's pipeline monopoly), Rosneft (a state oil company) and Gazprom (the state natural gas monopoly, which is now an oil player too). None of the three has ever been party to a successful project on non-Russian soil -- their record on new infrastructure projects on Russian soil is not exactly encouraging either -- and all have a tendency to expect other players to pay their way in joint projects. Additionally, the leaders of the three Russian firms are not too fond of each other, sporting numerous political and personal grudges -- in the case of the Gazprom and Rosneft leadership, these mutual feelings could be delicately described as unbridled loathing.
There are ways to ensure that a project will go nowhere, and this is certainly one the most effective.
(Excerpt) Read more at stratfor.com ...
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