Prime Minister Vladimir Putin clinched an outline deal with Uzbekistan on Tuesday to build a new pipeline to boost Central Asian gas exports to Russia, part of a strategy to strengthen Moscow's regional energy dominance. Russia wants former Soviet republics to channel more of their oil and gas via its territory, while Europe would like them to bypass Russia in order to reduce its own energy dependence on an increasingly assertive Moscow. The issue was dramatically highlighted last month when Russia fought a war against Georgia, which hosts the only oil and gas pipelines bringing supplies westwards from the Caspian Sea without crossing Russia. Uzbekistan - located in former Soviet Central Asia, which Moscow still sees as part of its sphere of influence - is one of the countries at the heart of this geopolitical struggle, which involves not just Russia and the West, but also China. “An agreement has been reached on the start of practical work to build a new gas pipeline system on the territory of Uzbekistan to provide for the growing export potential of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan,” Putin said. “We see that the potential for such partnership is growing. We have a mutual interest in the realisation of this project,” he was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. The new pipeline will increase gas exports from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which both use Soviet-era pipelines operated by Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom. Gazprom said in a statement an agreement on building a new pipeline and on the price formula for Uzbek gas had been reached. It gave no further details. Uzbek President Islam Karimov said the proposed pipeline, with a capacity of 26-30 billion cubic meters (bcm), would be built alongside the two existing Soviet-era pipelines, known as Central Asia-Centre and Central Asia-Bukhara-Ural. A spokesman for Putin confirmed that agreement had been reached with Uzbekistan to work out the details for building the new pipeline. If built, the new pipeline could be a threat to a rival European Union project, known as the Nabucco Gas Pipeline, which plans to pump gas from Central Asia to Europe starting in 2013. Nabucco, operated by a consortium led by Austrian group OMV, was proposed by EU partly as a means to ease its reliance on Gazprom supplies.
