Word: caspian
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...regard each other with equal measures of warmth and distrust. The Central Asian countries tagging along are also keen to pit the Chinese and Russians against each other in a global scramble for the vast reserves of natural resources lurking beneath the region's rolling steppe and in the Caspian Sea. Still, in the U.N. Security Council, China and Russia have presented something of a united front when it comes to Iran. Their combined weight has thwarted the West from levying stricter sanctions upon Tehran as it continues its quest for nuclear weaponry...
Diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas will push countries into violent competition, the Kremlin predicted in a long-awaited national security strategy paper released this week. The document foresees these struggles playing out in the Arctic as well as the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia - and states that Russia is prepared to fight for its share of the world's resources...
...Ukraine gas battle in January that left people in some E.U. countries freezing and factories idle. Currently, the E.U. gets more than 40% of its gas imports from just one company: Russia's giant Gazprom. In addition, almost all the gas that comes to Europe from the resource-rich Caspian flows through Gazprom's pipelines. Yet the long-planned Nabucco pipeline - designed to transport Azerbaijani, Turkmen and, maybe one day, Iranian and Iraqi gas to the E.U. through Turkey - is stuck at the planning stage...
...Options include investing more in gas storage and focusing on other sources of gas in the Caspian or North Africa and the Middle East. But building pipelines takes years, so a solution won't be easy...
...Adding urgency to the current discussions is the Russian invasion of Georgia, which has raised fears not just in Turkey but also in the West that instability in the region could interrupt energy supplies from the Caspian through Turkey to Western consumers. Ankara hopes its proposed "platform" would help reduce regional tensions...