Pipeline puts Tajikistan on energy map

Chinese and other investors may be about to open up the country’s upstream

Tajikistan shares the same geological basin as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but has not seen anything like the level of oil and gas exploration that its two neighbours have. But construction of a gas pipeline to China that runs though the mountainous Central Asian state may change that. On 13 September, a ceremony was held in Tajikistan to launch construction of the longest stretch of a new link that will supplement the existing Central Asia-China (CAC) pipeline running from Turkmenistan to China via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The new section bypassing Kazakhstan and passing through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, known as Line D, will increase the CAC pipeline’s overall annual capacity by 30 b