Turkey offers oil pipe lifeline to India

Turkey has offered – during a visit by Foreign Minister Ali Babacan to India this month – to facilitate the supply of oil to India from Central Asia via Israel through a combination of overland pipelines and super tankers.

Under the plan, oil transported through Turkey’s extensive pipeline infrastructure from Central Asia to its Ceyhan port would be sent across the Mediterranean Sea by tanker to Israel’s port of Ashkelon. There it would be fed into Israel’s Ashkelon-Eilat 254-kilometer pipeline. From Eilat port, again by tanker, it would be sent through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea via the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea to India. Neither Israel nor the US have commented on the proposal.
The Turkish offer holds out the promise of a well-established route

by which energy-hungry India could access Central Asian reserves, in contrast to less-practical alternatives.
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India imports about 70% of its oil requirements, a dependence that may increase to over 91% by 2020. About 45% of present needs comes from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – according to Indian Planning Commission figures, and if one includes oil imports from other parts of the Middle East, the region accounts for about 67% of India’s oil imports.

India, anxious to reduce this dependence on the Middle East for its fuel, given the political volatility of the region, is looking to Myanmar and Vietnam in its more immediate neighborhood, Sudan and Nigeria in Africa, and Turkmenistan in Central Asia to secure oil and also gas supplies.

The success of those efforts have been mixed.

Asia Times