Turkmenistan begins the construction of a gas pipeline to Pakistan and India

On 13 December 2015, Turkmenistan inaugurated the construction of the TAPI gas pipeline on its territory. It was intended to run from the Turkmen city of Mary via Afghanistan (Kandahar and Herat) to Pakistan and India. It is around 1800 km in length and has a planned capacity of 33 bcm per year; work on it is to be completed by December 2019. The consortium building the pipeline included Afghan Gas Enterprise, Inter State Gas Systems (Pakistan) and GAIL (India), under the leadership of Turkmengaz. According to media reports, this consortium was in talks to include Dragon Oil, controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates, which works in oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan. The pipeline’s resource base was to be the gas extracted from the third development phase of the Galkynysh field; Turkmenistan had also signed a framework agreement with a consortium of Japanese companies. The British company Penspen had drawn up a feasibility study which estimated the cost of building the pipeline at US$10 billion. The project had been initiated thanks to the involvement of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which helped the parties to reach an agreement, and had also financed the technical work.