Chief Executive Officer TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd, Muhammetmyrat Amanov held a meeting with Minister for Petroleum & Natural Resources Ghulam Sarwar and expressed his government’s desire to hold the inauguration ceremony of TAPI gas project in March. “At the inaugural ceremony, the heads of states of all four countries should be requested to attend the formality, “he said.
Earlier while delivering a lecture at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) CEO TAPI had revealed that The Islamic Development Bank (IDB) will provide $1billion to finance the project. In Mid October 2018 IDB had agreed to provide $700 million for TAPI pipeline portion in Turkmenistan. Negotiations are underway to provide additional $300 million for the remaining portion of the pipeline.
TAPI Gas pipeline is an 1,814 kilometres (1,130 miles) gas pipeline to feed Turkmenistan gas to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The total gas volume is 3.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. The estimated cost of the project is $8.5 billion. TAPI project will be completed in two phases. In the first phase, 1,800‑km pipeline will be constructed and in the second phase, six compressors will be installed. Turkmenistan’s government has been pushing the project to export some 33bn cu metres of gas annually from its massive Galkynysh gasfield. Turkmengaz was nominated as consortium leader in August 2015 with 85 percent shareholding and Pakistan, India and Afghanistan having 5 percent shares each.
