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The TAP operating consortium announced the milestone on November 15, mere days after Azerbaijan scored a major political victory in a peace deal with Armenia, ending six weeks of fighting over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. TAP connects near the Greek-Turkish border with the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP), SGC’s mid-stream pipe that was completed last year. From there it runs for 878 km across Greece and Albania and under the Adriatic Sea, making landfall in Italy. Under its first stage, it will pump up to 10bn cubic metres of gas per year from the BP-operated Shah Deniz field off Azerbaijan to customers in southern Europe.
The TAP consortium is led by BP and Azerbaijan’s national oil company SOCAR, with other members including Italy’s Snam, Belgium’s Fluxys, Spain’s Enagas and Switzerland’s Axpo. The pipeline has now “begun commercial operations”, the consortium said in a statement, although a spokesman clarified to NewsBase that this did not mean it was flowing gas.
“The start of commercial operations means that TAP is ready to transport gas,” the representative said in an email. “Any actual gas flows are up to the shippers’ choice, which they exercise through the daily nomination of the capacity they have booked in TAP.”
Italian buyers have agreed to take 8 bcm per year of TAP’s gas, while Greece is set to receive 1 bcm per year. A further 1 bcm will go to consumers in Bulgaria following the completion of an interconnector with Greece, which is anticipated in the second quarter of 2021. The dominant supplier for these markets is Russia.
The EU has provided substantial regulatory and financial support to SGC over the years, given it will enable countries in southern Europe to diversify their energy imports. It is unlikely that the ambitious project would have been realised without this backing.
Construction on the €4.5bn ($5.3bn) TAP took four and a half years to complete, with the pipeline originally due to have started operations in early 2020. Delays were earlier caused by permitting issues in Italy, where there has been a strong backlash to the pipeline from environmentalists. Construction work this year was also disrupted by coronavirus-related restrictions.
9.1.2 Transport sector news
Maersk launches first “block train” to link China and Georgia
Danish integrated shipping company Maersk has operated the first block train—a train type in which all the railcars carry the same commodity and are shipped from the same origin to the same destination—connecting China and Georgia. It is the first such service developed specifically to meet Georgian import requirements.
On October 4, the train from Xi’an in Shaanxi province, China, arrived in Tbilisi, completing a journey that inaugurated the new rail connection, which complements Maersk’s current coverage of the Caucasian republics (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia), Maersk announced.
“We are extremely happy to manage the first ever block train shipment under a product based entirely on intercontinental rail. We arranged this special service specifically for Georgian customers, and we plan to develop block train solutions for the whole Caucasus Region”, Irakli Danelia, Georgia commercial representative at A.P. Moller – Maersk, said in a press release.
In addition to providing another goods transit connection between Asia and Europe, further expansion of the product will strengthen Georgia’s role in the New Silk Road development. Xi'an has traditionally been the starting point of the Silk Road, namely the land routes that have connected East and West for over one thousand years.
55 GEORGIA Country Report August 2021 www.intellinews.com