Nabucco is Signed; Europe Gets Comic Relief

Grist for geopolitical actors and commentators for almost two decades, pipeline politics is again the biggest item in Europe.

Today's papers are filled with photos and news on the signing ceremony in Ankara for the Nabucco pipeline, which is meant to reduce Europe's reliance on Russia and its natural gas. The Financial Times has gone the furthest, running a photograph of the ceremony across four columns on the top of page one. The FT leads with a half-answer to the question of where the gas will come to fill the politically minded line -- the news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says he'll provide half the gas needed by the line, or 15 billion cubic meters a year, by 2015. Where and how he'll get that gas isn't made clear.

Nabucco, backed by the European Union and Washington, is vying against a proposed Russian natural gas pipeline called South Stream. Europe relies on Russia for some 25% of its natural gas, and there is concern that Moscow has or will use this market dominance as political leverage against members of the European Union. South Stream, it is said, will cement that hold on Europe even further, while Nabucco would add gas diversity. Russia says it's all nonsense, and that it is a reliable supplier.

But, as John Vinocur of The New York Times writes hilariously on his blog today, the real news comes from Germany, where it's the Showdown at the O.K. Corral for all-German gunslingers arrayed on either side of the pipeline debate.

As O&G and others have noted previously, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has raised eyebrows for some time for serving as Gazprom's pipeline representative in Europe. He is chairman of another proposed Russian line, called Nord Stream. Now, Schroeder faces a challenger: His former vice chancellor and foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. The venerable Fischer famously was a member of German radical groups in the 1970s before renouncing his past and becoming Germany's most popular politician, and now has been hired by two members of the Nabucco consortium.

Vinocur writes that this matchup is playing in Germany like Ali-Frazier. German bloggers are abuzz over the development. In an editorial, the left-of-center Süddeutsche Zeitung presents the rivalry between the pipelines “as something akin in the view of Europeans to the struggle between good and evil.”

There is much doubt that either pipeline will end up being built. Meanwhile, get out the popcorn.