When one door closes, another opens: How the failure of the Turkey - Austria natural gas pipeline project has led to recovery, resilience and scalability of successor projects

Abstract

There are numerous examples of energy policy failures (Heffron et al., 2018) which are now being systematically studied to provide for much-needed policy-relevant perspectives into key definitions, contexts, and theoretical frameworks for analysis (Sokołowski and Heffron, 2022). This paper will focus on one of the prominent examples of an energy policy failure; the case of the Turkey – Austria natural gas pipeline project,11Seminal research discussing the Turkey – Austria natural gas pipeline project, in the context of East – West gas transportation infrastructure, includes Winrow (2004). also known as Nabucco gas pipeline project (NGPP), and more broadly the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) strategy that dominated much of EU energy import diversification strategy in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Drawing on the NGPP case study, this paper analyses the EU's external policy, identifying its key failures and arguing that, paradoxically, the drawbacks of the NGPP that were attributed to political factors have led to recovery, improved resilience and, ultimately, appropriate scalability in successor projects. The Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) as well as the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) projects enabled the spirit of the failed energy policy to outlive the mega-scale Nabucco project by engaging and emancipating key regional energy stakeholders, particularly Turkey and Azerbaijan, thereby revitalizing their westward-oriented gas transit and supply strategies. With the door of the EU's external energy policy closing, the door of regional stakeholders opens, redefining our understanding of project risk and the associated economic, social and environmental aspects of it.