PULSE of TURKEY No 3................ WEDNESDAY MAY 13th 1998
ENERGY – THROUGH GREAT COOPERATION, NOT THE ‘GREAT GAME’
Energy catapults to top priority in Turkish-American relations. Will Cyprus and the Aegean be obstacles in 1998? The Eurasian Transit Corridor - the modern “Silk Road”, as part of energy arrangements.
Even though Turkey is located right in the middle of the world’s biggest oil and natural gas deposits, the Gulf and Caspian regions, it is not blessed with oil. Traditionally 45-50% of its energy had to be imported, with a drain of billions of dollars from its tight balance of payments every year. This deficit is constantly widening with the advance of Turkey’s industrialisation efforts.
Today Turkey imports 60% of its energy consumption which is the equivalent of 71 million tons of oil. This dependence on imports in energy will rise to 70% in 2010 and to 80% in 2020, if stringent measures are not taken without delay, warns Prof Özcan Ültanýr, Chairman of the Energy Work Group of Ankara University.
Energy Minister Cumhur Ersümer has recently said that in 2020 Turkey’s electricity consumption will reach 547 billion kWh. Considering that it is 103 billion kWh now, it is obvious what strenuous efforts Turkey has to exert to catch up with this target.
American Ambassador to Ankara Mark Parris says, “The Turkish government predicts that energy demand in Turkey will increase 10 per cent a year for the next two decades. To meet this demand, electricity generation capacity will have to increase five-fold. This means that 90,000 megawatts in new capacity will have to be added by the year 2020 at an investment of $99 billion. But do you know how much came on stream in 1997? Only 1,000 megawatts. Clearly, something is going to have to change.”
So everyone agrees that Turkey should do more to meet its energy needs of the future years. However, the energy need of the industrialised world is little less, if any. “The Department of Energy’s projections to the year 2020 indicate US and world dependancy on the Middle East growing significantly,” testified the Assistant Energy Secretary, Robert Gee, at a Senate Subcommittee in Washington recently. And that fact has made energy catapult to the top of the list of bilateral cooperation in US-Turkish relations, even overtaking the traditionally most important item – security cooperation. Indeed, the five-point agenda at PM Mesut Yýlmaz’s meeting with President Bill Clinton in Washington last December was composed of:
And what’s more in that order.
True that this list of priorities was favoured more by the Americans than the Turkish side. But it is a fact that energy is also Turkey’s top priority in international relations, so there was no objection from the Turkish side. Ankara’s objections to this list stemmed from the last item. Turkey’s attitude towards Washington on this point was the same as its reminder to the European Union at the Luxembourg summit – “Keep away from the Cyprus and Aegean questions if you want peaceful solutions, because any external leverages make the Greeks more intransigent and the problems insoluble.”
Ambassador Parris later said about this Turkish reaction, “I would be less than dishonest if I did not acknowledge that, looking ahead, I can see factors which could make 1998 a year of opportunity lost.” These factors, he clarified, were “the complex of issues relating to Greece, the Aegean and Cyprus.”
Such is the importance of energy for both Turkey and the United States that despite Ambassador Parris’s caution, 1998 does not seem to be a lost cause, as evidenced by the ‘burst of activity’ and developments which pursued the Clinton-Yilmaz summit in Washington. Thanks to these contacts it is believed that the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project will be the one chosen to carry the Caspian oil and probably natural gas deposits to the West, when the final decision is taken by October this year. The USA has come to accept PM Yýlmaz’s argument in Washington last December that “Turkey is positioned to serve as our region’s energy distribution hub. We are one of the shortest routes to export Caspian oil and gas to western markets. The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project offers a secure route and a cost-effective means of exporting this oil to international markets.”
Turkey’s aim is to achieve this objective through multilateral cooperation of the Central Asian and Caucasus countries, plus the USA and Russia, instead of the ‘Great Game’ which was played between Russia and Britain over Central Asian resources at the end of the 19th century.
“Strategic ambivalence” over Caspian oil
Is this aim a realistic one? Given the Taliban militia’s announcement in Afghanistan in October 1996 about a $2 billion project to run theTurkmenistan oil and natural gas to the Indian Ocean through a pipeline via Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Russia’s aims to carry oil by tankers through the Turkish straits, it is not.
This unrealistic wish of cooperation instead of strife does not, however, only belong to Turkey, but also to all the major powers which are playing this great energy game today. The struggle between Washington and Moscow for energy supremacy is not over by any means. The United States is particularly worried about Russian-Iranian cooperation in every field. It also views with concern Russia’s “strategic ambivalence” over the Caspian energy. US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot said in Congress on March 31st, “Some forces in that country are nostalgic for the Soviet and Russian empires. But there are also other forces at play in the great drama of Russian politics today that want to see their country adapt itself to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century rather than replay the Great Game of the 19th.”
Turkey is walking a tightrope whilst bringing the two super powers round to its energy plans, particularly the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. The USA has sincerely come to support this project and there is exemplary cooperation between Ankara and Washington for its realisation, especially when Washington is not annoyed with Turkey’s other energy arrangements.
Above and beyond the Azerbaijan oil, both countries are working for a Eurasian transit corridor to export oil and gas resources from the Caspian region. US Under-Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat says, “We believe, in particular, that a gas pipeline across the Caspian and through the Caucasus to Turkey would provide a much-needed outlet for Turkmenistan’s energy. Ultimately, it could also accommodate gas from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Russia…We have been working with Turkey to make a Baku-Ceyhan pipeline a commercially attractive option for private companies. Turkey has embraced taking a leading role in promoting this pipeline…We were pleased to see that the foreign ministers of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Georgia met earlier this month (March) in Istanbul and issued a communiqué supporting an East-West corridor. They also scheduled a follow-on meeting to be held in Tbilisi in May.”
Washington, as stated by Eizenstat, was pleased with the first regional intergovernmental conference in Ýstanbul on 1-2 March, but Moscow was not at all. It promptly issued a stiffly worded warning: “No one can exclude Russia from the Caspian oil arrangements.”
The Turkish Foreign Ministry mumbled an excuse about the session being preparatory work and assured Russia that it would be included in due course. But the whole issue was a typical example of the difficulties involved for Turkish diplomacy in carrying out this oil policy with “great cooperation instead of the Great Game”.
Ankara has, therefore, come to accept the policy of carrying out its own policies to meet its energy needs with the best terms possible by going along with both or at least one of the two supers, if possible. That is why while Turkey and the USA enjoy very good cooperation on the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, they have differences of opinion about its scope and other energy arrangements of Turkey.
Three cases in point are the natural gas pipeline agreement between Turkey and Iran, the “Blue Current” project between Turkey and Russia, and the Turkmenistan natural gas export projects. Washington sees Turkey as a pivot for suitable arrangements for all these projects. Ankara more than welcomes this realism, but when it finds it impossible to coordinate American designs with the long-term energy arrangements of the region, it reluctantly choses to go it alone, risking headaches about Cyprus and other similar issues. That is exactly where Turkish-American relations are standing today.