Allaw : 1.3 billion cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan to Syria by Late 2012

Syria and Azerbaijan signed last week an agreement to provide Syria 3.5 million cubic meters of Azeri gas per day for twenty years.

Oil Minister Sufian Allaw said that “the agreement will provide the equivalent of 1.3 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Syria at reasonable prices through pipelines with Georgia and Turkey.”

Allaw added that “the agreement will be executed in late 2012 because of the pending completion of Turkey to the section on the gas pipeline project between Syria and Turkey, as Syria would end extending the pipeline within its territory in early 2012, however, the Turks will take a longer time.”

Allaw headed Syrian side in the meetings of the joint Syrian-Azerbaijan committee last July and said that meeting came within Syria’s policy to strengthen relations with Azerbaijan, which strengthened the President’s visit to Azerbaijan last year 08/07/2009, which resulted in the signing of several agreements and memorandums of understanding in various fields, pointing out that the issue of import of gas was welcomed and willingness to meet demand of the Syrian side for the supply of 1 – 1.5 billion cubic meters of gas annually via Turkey and expressed the Azerbaijani side is ready to deliver the gas at the point of the Syrian border – Turkish and within the long-term agreement and at a preferential expression of privacy the relationship between the two countries.

Syria has signed with Turkey in late 2009 an agreement to link the systems of gas between the two countries to buy and sell natural gas and passed to Syria via Turkey and transport it by pipeline stretching from the area of Turkoglu to the Syrian-Turkish border on the Syrian side and Aleppo to the Syrian-Turkish border on the Syrian side.

In a related context, he pointed to the agreement signed by Syria with Iraq to build oil pipelines and gas to the Syrian ports, asserting that “the agreement, the extension of three lines of the first to transport heavy oil can 1.5 million barrels per day and the second 1.3 million barrels per day of light oil and the third is to transport Iraqi gas to Syria and neighboring countries, Europe, the size of 35 million cubic meters a day. ”

Syria began talks with Iraq to re-link the power grids between the two countries after the decline of Syrian production, noting that Iraq has been exporting to Syria about a thousand barrels per day of crude oil through a pipeline linking the Kirkuk oilfields Iraqi port of Banias, but it stops after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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