Afghanistan on Wednesday announced that construction would soon commence on a $10 billion pipeline carrying natural gas through South Asia as officials attended Turkmenistan’s celebration of the pipeline’s construction on the other side of the border.
The realization of the TAPI pipeline connecting Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India has been slowed down several times by security problems in Afghanistan. “From today, the operations will start on Afghanistan soil,” Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said at the ceremony in comments broadcast by Afghan state television.
Officials on both sides of the border, including the Afghan Prime Minister Hassan Akhund, welcomed the project at the border ceremony in Islim Chashma in Turkmenistan. “This project will bring benefits not only to the participating countries’ economies but also to the majority of countries in the entire region,” Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedow stated during his live television address during the ceremony.
A public holiday was declared in Herat province on the Afghan border to commemorate the foundation of the project; the capital also bears the same name, and large posters representing the project were put up. It will produce about 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas for the Galkynysh gas field located in southeast Turkmenistan.
The gas will be transported through a 1,800-kilometer pipeline passing through Afghanistan involving the cities of Herat and Kandahar in its south region, then through Balochistan province in Pakistan, and finally to Fazilka in Indian Punjab.
Pakistan and India will consume 42 percent of the gas, and Afghanistan 16 percent of it. In contrast, for transportation of the gas to Afghanistan, Pakistan will provide 500 million dollars annually to Kabul as transit fees, according to the Afghan press.
The construction started on the Turkmen side in 2015, and in Afghanistan, the building was planned for 2018 but has been delayed several times. The Indian side’s commitment to the pipeline has also been questionable due to its relations with Pakistan and the availability of the market of liquefied natural gas.
The ceremony became an opportunity to start quite a number of bilateral projects at the same time – construction of the fiber-optic line connecting Herat, the electricity line, and also the opening of the railway bridge.
In a country with high unemployment, TAPI “will create employment opportunities for 12,000 people in Afghanistan, “the government spokesman Mujahid said to AFP. Again, Afghan or Turkmen officials still need to give specifications on how this funding would be obtained or when TAPI would be operational.
Nonetheless, the Netherlands-based analyst with the research group Rystad Energy, Swapnil Babele, foresees more time addition “since there is a lot of work still to be done and as for the financing of the future as well there is no clear answer.”
”We expect it to be operational only in the next decade,” he said when speaking to AFP. In essence, the pipeline shall be advantageous to the three recipient countries in the sense that it will bring in gas cheaper than liquefied natural gas, and more importantly, there shall be a guaranteed supply.
It is the largest investment project since the Taliban’s administration seized power in August 2021, effectively ending the group’s 20-year-long insurgency against foreign-backed government.
The pipeline puts the government, unrecognized by any country of the world, in an important role in the cooperation in Central Asia and South Asia, and the deficit of energy resources.
Afghanistan still experiences economic and financial freezing from Western countries, and now it is barely able to resume large-scale projects, mainly energy, mines, and infrastructure.
Late last month, Afghanistan and China embarked on a large-scale copper mining project that is thought to be the second biggest copper reserve after the one in the US close to the country’s capital, Kabul. This project stopped in 2008 and remained dormant until the completion of the current study.
