Officials present in the meeting said, India wanted to pay a price less than landed cost of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG). Customers will prefer to import LNG, if it would be cheaper than natural gas from Turkmenistan, they said. According to Indian sources, after calculating backward, the price of gas will be desired out, which should be comparable with India's long-term LNG contract, which is around $12-13 per unit.
All four countries are equally interested in the TAPI pipeline. A consortium that will build and operate the pipeline will be put in place by 2013 and the pipeline will be completed by 2016. The security of the pipeline would be responsibilities of countries through which it would pass. The pipeline will cross through volatile regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is a major concern for India which is a consumer located at the tail end of the pipeline.
While signing agreements for construction of multi-billion transnational natural gas pipeline in December last year, former oil minister Murli Deora had said that Turkmenistan should provide gas at competitive rates and that all the countries involved in the project should share the risks involved in the transit of gas through volatile regions.
Other gas-consuming countries along the 1,680 km pipeline - Afghanistan and Pakistan will also negotiate the gas price with Turkmenistan separately as Turkmenistan wants to sign separate commercial terms with the three gas consuming nations. Turkmenistan has agreed to supply 90 million standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd) gas to the three consumers. India is expected to get about 38 mmscmd gas, the same as Pakistan. The rest of the gas will go to Afghanistan. The proposed pipeline will start from the Dauletabad gas field in southeast Turkmenistan and after 145 km stretch in the country enter Afghanistan. After traversing 735 km in Afghanistan and 800 km in Pakistan, the pipeline will cross into India.
Meanwhile, India is again examining the possibility of paying Iran through rupees for its oil imports. The option has been reopened as earlier efforts to make payments to Iran through third country banks, have failed.
Iran is India’s second biggest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia and imports total about $ 12 billion (Rs 53,280 crore) a year.
Iranian supplies to India have not yet been hit, despite India’s central bank stopping a clearing house system for crude imports from the Islamic nation in December, under pressure from the US.
India stopped making payments earlier last month via a Hamburg-based bank handling international trade for Iranian companies.
The use of the German bank had drawn strong disapproval from the US, which suspects Iran is using its oil money to fund a nuclear weapons programme.
(IPA Service)
INDIA TO SIGN TAPI PROJECT BY JULY 31
TRANSIT FEE ISSUE UNDER DISCUSSION
Special Correspondent - 2011-05-04 11:22
NEW DELHI: The issue of fixing transit fee that India will be paying to Pakistan and Afghanistan for allowing passage of the gas, will come up for discussion in Kabul on May 13 and 14 at the meeting of the four countries — Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, who are participants in the TAPI project. At the 13th meeting of the working group held here last week, major issues were sorted out and the officials of the four countries decided to sign the US$7.6 billion transnational gas pipeline by July 31 this year.