A model pipe in Turkmenistan, a symbol of the country’s soon-to-be booming natural gas industry.
On a recent trip to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a group of Japanese business officials met with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, and signed many significant energy deals, Deutsche Welle reports. Among them, the biggest is likely Japanese engineering giant JGC joining an effort to create a large plant around the country’s large natural gas reserves.
The Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan has the fourth largest natural gas reserves in the world, with 17.5 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves. To put this in perspective, Turkmenistan has nearly double the amount of reserves as the country with the fifth largest natural gas reserves, the United States.
The Japanese-Turkmenistan energy deals that were officially signed on Friday are estimated to be worth over $18 billion. Prime Minister Abe, in an official statement, said that the “government bodies and private companies of Japan, as a united team, will work as much as possible with Turkmenistan with the goal of reaching a new milestone in its industrial development with the active use of natural gas.” However, Japan is certainly not alone in looking to help develop Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves.
For quite some time now, Turkmenistan’s natural gas market has been dominated by Russia’s Gazprom industries, which currently makes up two-thirds of all of the country’s gas exports. However, Ashgabat has increasingly accused Gazprom of being an unreliable business partner, this summer claiming that Gazprom had not paid for any of its gas exports that year. As spats between Gazprom and Turkmenistan have increased over the years, Turkmenistan has moved to become less dependent on Russia in energy sectors.
In response to this, other countries and energy businesses have jumped at the chance of getting access to the large Turkmen gas fields. China currently imports up to 35 billion cubic meters of gas per year, and that number is only expected to increase as China will likely eventually replace Russia as Turkmenistan’s leading trading partner. European countries have also tried to tap into Turkmenistan’s energy potential, as they also hope to lessen dependence on Russia for natural gas. Turkmenistan has even set up an ambitious project to build a pipeline from its country to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; countries that are very much in need of natural gas. And despite concerns about its feasibility, Japanese businesses still have interest in investing in the pipeline, which is expected to begin production December this year or early next year.
As the totalitarian Central Asian nation’s reserves become more developed (through deals like the ones made with Japan, which will increase Turkmenistan’s technological capabilities to make its abundant gas actually usable), the more the competition for natural gas in the country will grow. As a neutral country, Turkmenistan can find itself working with liberal Western countries, third world countries, and pretty anyone its leader Berdymukhamedov sees fit.
However, Turkmenistan is still an incredibly closed-off and totalitarian country. It hides behind a veil of proclaimed neutrality to disguise its massive human rights abuses, which are on par with some of the worst in the world. And very few foreigners are ever allowed into the country. But through this increased business that is only expected to continue at a steady pace, there is a chance that Turkmenistan may open up, if only just a little; and in this case, although human rights would likely not improve in the country, they may at least be more out in the open, exposed for the global public at large to see.
Newborn Republic 