A long-delayed project for natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan is still "a very real project and very feasible," Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday.
The 1,400-km (875-mile) line, at dollars 3.3 billion cost is designed to link vast gas reserves of Turkmenistan with markets in Pakistan and India.
But the only way to open the South Asian market to Turkmenistan's reserves, the world's third largest, is across Afghanistan. Decades of instability there have kept the project on drawing board.
Karzai said during a visit to Paris that strong economic growth in India and Pakistan kept energy demand there high.
"The pipeline is a very real project," he told a conference at the French Institute of International relations. "Work is going on it. Certain facts have to emerge on the quantity of gas that will be available and the years in which it will be available," he said.
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an agreement in December 2002 to build a pipeline that would run from the Dauletabad gas field in southern Turkmenistan to Herat in western Afghanistan and then Kandahar in the south. From there it would run to Multan in Pakistan, with one potential future spur leading to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, where a gas liquefaction plant could be built, and another crossing the Indian border and continuing to New Delhi.
Dauletabad had gross reserves of 1.4 trillion cubic metres (tcm) of gas, out of proven country reserves of about 2.0 tcm. That would be enough to provide gas for trans-Afghan pipeline for a few years but after that gas from other fields would be needed to meet the pipeline project's targets, it said.