To replace missing supplies from Russia, Europe is buying gas from Azerbaijan. Natural gas has been flowing into the pipeline since the weekend.
Since this weekend, Azerbaijan has also been supplying natural gas to Germany and Austria for the first time. As the state energy company “State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic” (Socar) explained, the gas flows via the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) from Turkey through Greece and Albania to southern Italy and is fed into the EU-wide network there.
Construction of the pipeline began in 2015 to become less dependent on Russian deliveriesthe tube has been in operation since 2020. However, like Russia, Azerbaijan is an autocratic regime that takes tough action against dissidents.
The Azerbaijani contractual partner is Sefe, an almost unknown state-owned company that took over the shares of Gazprom Germania GmbH in 2022 after the Russian attack on Ukraine. Sefe had signed a ten-year contract that guaranteed the Azerbaijanis the purchase of 1.5 billion cubic meters per year. The Federal Republic has made an international legal commitment to be climate neutral by 2045. According to scientists, fossil natural gas would have to be replaced much earlier.
“There should not be a single fossil fuel project left”
But the German federal government is obviously not aware of this: On Friday, the black and red coalition introduced a so-called “unitarianization agreement” into the Bundestag, which is intended to produce natural gas off the German North Sea island of Borkum. “If this government is serious about a climate goal, there should not be a single new fossil fuel project,” said Nele Evers, spokeswoman for Fridays for Future.
But that’s exactly what the Union and the SPD obviously have in mind: off Borkum, the Dutch fossil company One-Dyas wants to extract natural gas from the North Sea bed for 35 years; Germany’s approval is necessary for this. The group is in the lobby register of the German Bundestag registered.
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