Albania in the maps of oil and gas pipelines

TIRANA, May 3 – Albania may soon be included in another gas pipeline. In Croatia, for instance, a major gas pipeline expansion project is already well advanced, and plans are afoot to connect the transmission facility to the proposed trans-Adriatic pipeline running from Greece via Albania to Italy.
According to Vladimir Durovic, manager of the development division at Croatia’s state-owned Plinacro, the Croatian state company that runs the national gas transmission system, 220m ($300m) was spent between 2002 and 2006, in large part to extend supply from the northeast of the country to Pula and the Adriatic. A second development stage is now under way, at a projected cost of 450m, to bring the pipeline down to Split and then Dubrovnik and points south. Current demand runs to 2.69bn cu m, 1.66bn cu m of which supplied domestically and the remainder imported.
‘We would like to connect our pipeline project with the trans-Adriatic, in order to serve Albania, Montenegro, southern Bosnia and southern Croatia,’ he said. ‘We are calculating on 5bn cu m as a branch of the trans-Adriatic. This so-called Ionian-Adriatic pipeline would tap into the trans-Adriatic in Albania.’
The TAP is currently going through the approval process in Greece, Albania and Italy and the detailed engineering phase is under way with a view to construction beginning in the first quarter of next year.
The pipeline, which is due to come ashore in the Italian port town of Brindisi, will have initial capacity of 10bn cu m and the possibility for a doubling to 20bn cu m.
A planned trans-Balkan pipeline will begin transporting oil from the Black Sea to the Adriatic by 2011, according to Gligor Tashkovich, Macedonia’s minister for foreign investment. That the pipeline offered advantages over its main regional competitor, the Burgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline that will carry Russian oil through Bulgaria to Greece. “I expect the physical groundbreaking to begin in either June or September of next year,” he said. “With completion expected by 2011.”
Tashkovich said the $1.5 billion (1.2 billion euros) pipeline, known as the AMBO project, will link Burgas in Bulgaria to Vlore in Albania and would not have to rely on government funding. He claimed it could offer per-kilometer transit rates of about $9.10 a ton. Per-kilometer transit rates for the Burgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline נscheduled to start operating in 2010 נwill be $5.42 a ton, according to Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum, part of the consortium involved in the project.
Both pipelines will bypass the busy Bosphorus strait in Turkey. Tashkovich said the terminus at Vlore, Albania, would offer better deep-water port facilities than Alexandroupolis in northern Greece. “Go study the figures,” he said. “I think you will find that Alexandroupolis will not be able to support as big tankers as they claim.”
However, the 895-kilometer AMBO pipeline will be three times as long as Burgas-Alexandroupolis, will cross hillier terrain and will transit three countries rather than two. Ministers from Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania signed an agreement on Jan. 31 setting out the legal framework for the AMBO project. Tashkovich said the pipeline is designed for long-haul oil transit, and would be better positioned to serve western European and North American markets than Alexandroupoulis, much farther to the east, and Trieste to the north נwhich may connect with Constanta on Romania’s Black Sea coast.
The minister also claimed that the project had received commitments from a major oil company to use up to a quarter of the pipeline’s capacity, though he would not name the company. The project will be financed by 71 percent debt and 29 percent equity. It is being organized by the Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corp., after a feasibility study financed by the US government in 2000.
Once financing has been secured and impact assessments completed, construction could begin in June or September of 2008 and would take 24-39 months to complete, Tashkovich said. It is still unclear where the oil for the AMBO pipeline will come from.
Tashkovich said there is enough oil supply coming online from new producers in the Caucasus נwhich includes countries such as Kazakhstan as well as Russia נto sustain both Balkan pipeline projects and others such as Constanta-Trieste and pipelines in Turkey. “There’s tons of oil for all pipelines,” he said.