Launch ceremony for the Afghanistan section of TAPI in 2018
Turkmenistan's pipe dream
Construction of the pipeline in Afghanistan is making tangible progress, but extending it into Pakistan and India remains unrealistic for political reasons
The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India (TAPI) pipeline is under construction in Afghanistan. Only 14km has been built, and industry sources say Ashgabat is financing the project itself, without any supply commitments. But this represents tangible progress for a pipeline that has been planned since the fall of the Soviet Union. But for significant political reasons, extending the pipeline to Pakistan and India is just as unrealistic as it was a decade ago. TAPI was born in the early 1990s, as newly independent Turkmenistan sought to develop new export routes for its vast gas reserves beyond Russia. Moscow refused to let Turkmenistan use its pipelines to export gas to Europe, instead buyi
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