Recently in Caspian Category

The $4 billion sale of Germany's Open Grid Europe pipeline system to banks and financial institutions in late May is a watershed moment in Europe's gas market.

The company that owned it, E.ON Ruhrgas, was one of the giants of the gas establishment, starting off in the middle of the last century to develop a formidable battery of pipelines, production assets and natural gas purchase and supply contracts.

How the 12,000 kilometer network develops in the future -- dislocated from the former parent company's gas procurement and supply business -- will be watched with close interest by those involved with Europe's energy markets.

(With some additional comments from Mark Lewis, toward the bottom).

Wrapping up day 1 of the Platts European Oil Storage Conference in Amsterdam was a panel of several of that day's speakers. Two subjects stood out in the discussion: the sad situation of European refineries, beset by closures and poor margins, and the opportunities to build storage in the Mediterranean. Here are a few of the key points made by some of the panelists, mostly paraphrased, but with some direct quotes.

What is the purpose of the EU's much vaunted Southern Gas Corridor and of this week's Azerbaijan-Turkey agreements in particular?

There was a time just a few years ago, when the answer to the broader question was simple: the Southern Corridor was intended to get gas to a European Union where demand was soaring, domestic production was falling and there was a fear of enforced over-reliance on Russian imports. But today the emphasis is far more on getting gas into one particular corner of Europe: the South East.

What kind of a speech do you give when you're invited to a party and you want to get a difficult message across without upsetting your hosts?

That was the dilemma confronting two very senior executives from Chevron and ExxonMobil when they addressed the Kazenergy Forum in the glittering Kazakh capital of Astana last week. They had some serious points to make about the conditions for foreign companies in general, and their own in particular, but they would have been way out of line had they been too blunt in their comments.

So how do you go about getting your points across? Naturally you start by praising Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country's president. But for what do you praise him? For presiding over the quadrupling of oil production from 20 mt in 1991 to 79.7 mt in 2010? For the giant pipelines and shipping routes that mean his country now exports around 1.5 million b/d to markets as far afield as the United States, China and Western Europe? Or for overseeing the country's emergence as the world's leading producer of uranium?

By October 1, the three rival groups wanting to develop pipelines to carry Azerbaijani gas to Europe must make their final submissions.

It must be a nightmare, preparing the documentation for their bids. They each know the strengths and weaknesses of their rivals; they each know that none of their bids will perfectly suit Azerbaijan's requirements. How do they know this? They know it because for years they've taken part in countless panels to consider the merits-and faults-of each proposal. If any one of them had even come close to developing a clearly superior system, they would have already secured Azerbaijani agreement for a new export line.

What constitutes having gas? If you want to build a pipeline, this is obviously one of the most crucial questions to ask. But it's not usually asked in quite that form.

The point is that it is worth considering what constitutes availability. In theory, of course, there's lots of gas that can be made available for a pipeline, as the rival stories of efforts to develop the South Stream and Southern Corridor pipelines to Europe show.