Energy key in the new Asian architecture

globalresearch.ca :

China took just 10 months to propose, construct, and operationalise a 1,000 kilometre oil pipeline from Atasu in Kazakhstan to Alashankou in Xinjiang. No sooner was that project completed a few months ago than China indicated its eagerness to lay a gas pipeline along the same route as well. "We completed the 4,500 km-long pipeline from Xinjiang to Shanghai in just two and a half years," Chin Geng, president of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) told India's Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and a group of top Indian executives in Beijing earlier this month. The Indian side was suitably impressed.

Though a recent convert to the cause of pipelines, India is seeking to compensate for its earlier lack of interest with an ambitious proposal for an Asian gas grid that links Asia's major energy producing and consuming regions to one another. India has unveiled an ambitious $22.4 billion pan-Asian gas grid and oil security pipeline system.

Pipelines aim to deliver gas, crude or products between discrete points. The underlying economic logic of a grid is that the capital costs can be more easily absorbed and amortised and energy supplies calibrated to match demand variations in the consuming countries without too much effort. But there is a political logic as well. As Asian grid will create mutual dependencies, giving countries a stake in the political and economic stability of one another, and hasten the process of regional integration.

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