Turkey to Build Gas Pipe to Azeri Exclave
Construction will start on a gas pipeline linking Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan with Turkey, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on February 25 at a conference with Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev.
The project, which Azerbaijan and Turkey signed a memorandum on a decade ago, would provide Nakhchivan with 500mn m3/yr of gas from both Turkey and Iran, Erdogan said. He did not specify when exactly construction would begin, nor when the two sides would sign a necessary contract.
Nakhchivan is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by its hostile neighbour Armenia. The exclave's western border is all with Iran, except for a 8-km section it shares with Turkey.
The region currently gets all its gas under a 25-year swap deal between Azerbaijan and Iran that came into force in 2005. Under this deal, Azerbaijan deliveries gas via the border city of Astara to Iran, which in turn supplies its own gas to Nakhchivan via Jolfa.
Azeri gas supplies to Iran totalled 395mn m3 of gas last year. Iran only delivers 85% of the volumes it receives to Nakhchivan, however, keeping the rest as a transit fee. Baku has several times asked for the terms of the arrangement to be revised, including the transit fee, but Tehran has rejected this.
Azerbaijan's Socar and Turkey's Botas signed the memorandum on building a 160-km between Igdir in Turkey and Nakhchivan in 2010, at a time when relations between Baku and Tehran were frosty. Ties have improved since Iranian president Hassan Rouhani took office in 2013. But after the US began imposing sanctions on Iran in 2018, Azeri government has sought to limit Nakhchivan's dependence on Iranian gas.
Erdogan and Aliyev also signed a memorandum on February 25 to build the Kars-Igdir-Nakhchivan railway, establishing a new cargo route between Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan proper. At present the only major route is through Iran.