Mark Iden

Botas, Turkey's state-owned crude oil and natural gas pipelines and trading company, has opened a tender for the construction of a jetty, measuring station and transit pipeline for a new Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRU) LNG import terminal on the Gulf of Saros in northwest Turkey.

The long simmering Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict, centering around the region of Nagorno-Karabakh and subject to frequent eruptions over the course of its post Soviet history, has blown once again.  At least four Azeri soldiers were killed and scores wounded, in addition to a number of wounded Armenian soldiers.

The fraying relationship between Ankara and Moscow has had a negative impact on the reopening of the Blue Stream gas pipeline.

In the wake of judicial decisions effectively shutting down the Atlantic and Dakota Access interstate pipeline projects, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that construction on the infamous Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline cannot begin, thus rejecting a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to jump-start the long-delayed project.

Energy Transfer's $3.8bn, 1,172-mile underground pipeline carrying oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa and to a shipping point in Illinois and up and running for three years already has been ordered to cease operations by a district court judge until a more thorough environmental assessment review has been made.

In an announcement shocking in its implications for interstate pipeline development, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy have canceled their Atlantic Coast Pipeline project, a natural gas pipeline that was to stretch hundreds of miles across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, citing "legal uncertainty."

India's long awaited plan to simplify its gasoline pipeline tariff system has been announced with great fanfare.

In the face of expanded US sanctions against companies and countries participating in the development of Nord Stream 2, the EU is preparing its own measures to protect the European Union as the United States tightens its sanctions law.

Nigeria has begun constructing a $2.8 billion gas pipeline project, the biggest in the country's history. The 614-km long pipeline will run from Ajaokuta to Kano under the auspices of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

While Nordstream stutters on its way to Europe, Turkstream is proceeding apace:  Hungary's MOL announced last week that it would join the Turkstream pipeline consortium. The regulator approved a 10-year development plan that includes the construction of a new Serbian-Hungarian gas inter-connector, with a capacity of 6 billion cubic meters annually.