Tap on track

The Caspian gas pipeline to feed into Europe has secured its project financing

The completion of the €3.9bn project financing for the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (Tap) has, after a tortuous gestation, paved the way for the final stage of the southern gas corridor (SGC) route into Europe from Azerbaijan to be completed on time in 2020. The Tap project, designed to handle 10bn m³/yr of Azeri gas, has suffered a host of complications since the consortium building it won the bidding process in 2013 to take gas from the Turkish/Greek border across Greece and Albania, then under the Adriatic to Italy. A changing pool of shareholders, the complex web of legal and political agreements required and, more latterly, objections to the pipeline in Italy, have slowed development. The f