Iran holds key to India's energy
insecurity By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In the rapidly intensifying international
energy game, Iran holds a master key to the most
staggering roadblock to India's economic growth -
energy insecurity. With the issue of energy
cooperation expected to dominate talks on Tuesday
between visiting Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad and his hosts in New Delhi, a new
chapter in India-Iran relations is on the horizon
that will likely bring the two countries closer
together on a long-term basis.
While not
an official state visit, since it is Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh's turn to visit Iran,
Ahmadinejad's brief yet significant stopover after
his trips to Sri Lanka and Pakistan has been
widely interpreted by the global media as a
landmark development that will usher in a new era
of energy cooperation between energy-starving
India and energy-rich Iran, which is
also
a
suitable conduit for the third-country supply of
energy to India, given Iran's expanding oil and
gas connections to landlocked Central Asian
nations.
With oil prices skyrocketing,
India's thirst for cheaper imported gas has
acquired a greater urgency than ever before,
considering what the Hindustan Times has termed as
the growing "supply-demand mismatch" reflected in
the recent news that "as against an overall
requirement of 77 million standard cubic meters
per day (mmscmd) of gas between April 2007 and
January 2008, only 37 mmscmd was supplied".
Sure, India has other prospects besides
Iran and, in addition to investing in Yemeni oil
fields and negotiating with Saudi Arabia, Oman and
Qatar, questing for a piece of the Iraqi energy
market and scouting various African countries
(such as Nigeria, Chad, Angola, Cameron and
Congo), Indian officials have also been playing
catch-up with China in Central Asia lately,
seeking deals with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
But with the Turkmenistan's proximity to
Iran and Iran's ability to act as an energy
corridor for the sub-continent, the salient
importance of Iran is indisputable.
In
addition to the US$7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India
(IPI) pipeline, India has set its eyes on a
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI)
pipeline that is, for now at least, more of a
pipedream because of growing insecurity in
Afghanistan, reflected in the bold assassination
attempt on President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this
week.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov
of Turkmenistan has called for a United Nations
convention on pipeline security, but few expect
that the opponents of the government in Kabul,
which has limited control outside the capital,
will honor any such conventions. As soft targets,
pipelines have been attacked in both Pakistan and
India and while the IPI pipeline will go through
insurgency-infested Balochistan province in
Pakistan, there is ample reason to believe that
Islamabad can provide sufficient security through
a deft combination of surveillance and economic
carrots for the ethnic Balochis.
Thus,
with the TAPI put on hold pending security
developments in Afghanistan, India, which has come
out empty handed from its recent gas efforts with
respect to, among others, Myanmar and Bangladesh,
has woken to the simple fact that nearly all roads
lead to Tehran.
So, instead of TAPI, a
revised TIPI (Turkmenistan-Iran-Pakistan-India)
may be plotted, whereby Turkmenistan's plentiful
gas reserves can reach both India and Pakistan.
This is not to mention Iran's ability to expand
its present oil-swap agreements, for example with
Kazakhstan, whereby India could collect at Iran's
Persian Gulf terminals the equivalent of what the
Kazakhs, or for that matter Azerbaijanis or even
Russians, deliver at Iran's northern and Caspian
points. Iran's hitherto ill-explored oil riches in
its Caspian sector are also a candidate for joint
ventures with Indian companies.
Already,
beginning in 2005, Iran and India have entered
into a $40 billion, 25-year LNG (liquefied natural
gas) agreement, and India, along with China, is a
(30%) shareholder of a joint company to develop
Iran's largest oil field, the Yadavaran. Iran and
India have also reached an agreement for
development of Chahbahar and construction of a
highway from that port city to Afghanistan and
Central Asia, as part and parcel of the ambitious
project known as the North-South Corridor.
The Oil Ministry in Tehran posits India as
the fourth-largest consumer of Iran's energy,
while India, which imports more than two thirds of
its oil needs, anticipates this figure to increase
by up to 90% by 2030 following a 1997
parliamentary document "Hydro-carbon Prospects
2025". New Delhi therefore has no alternative,
whatever the side-effects with respect to its
relations with the US, but to pursue a
comprehensive energy cooperation with Iran.
Hypothetically then, what is needed is a
follow-up to the 1997 report by the Indian
parliament's energy committee, which lamented the
absence of a "coherent and long-term" energy
strategy and which acknowledges the dual role of
Iran, both as a source of energy as well as an
outlet for other countries' energy exports to
India.
Maybe then US lawmakers will
realize why their Indian counterparts have risked
violating US sanctions laws on Iran that forbid
such bold initiatives by New Delhi toward Iran.
And these, by all accounts, are not limited to
energy, but include the entire gamut of economic,
trade, cultural, political and even security
cooperation.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of
After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's
Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author
of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown
Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2,
Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote
"Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard
International Review, and is author of
Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus
Fiction.
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