Azerbaijan – a country that was supposed to be a key backer of Nabucco West project – said it had selected the alternative route for its gas - running through Greece and Albania. Experts say this could mean end for the EU-backed gas pipeline project.

Azerbaijan said it would deliver its gas to Europe through the

 Greece-Albania-Italy Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP. That’s instead of the initially-planned Nabucco West venture - a truncated version of the Nabucco pipeline system, which would run across Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to Western Europe.

Among the TAP consortium members are Norway's Statoil, Axpo of Switzerland and the German firm E.ON.

“The Nabucco West project was not selected by the consortium. While OMV accepts the decision of the consortium, OMV is of the opinion that the offer ... met all the selection criteria and was highly competitive,” Austrian power utility OMV, which is backing Nabucco, said in a company statement. 

 Azerbaijan’s withdrawal could in fact mean the end of Nabucco, as BFM.ru quotes Vyacheslav Mishchenko, development director at Argus Media. It’ll be almost impossible to find another gas supplier within the next couple of years.

“The Trans-Adriatic Pipeline is more attractive. Its length is just a bit above 500 km and Azerbaijan already has work experience in the South European market. After SOCAR [State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic] won the bid to buy Greek Depa, it may be seeing synergy between the two projects,” he said.

The Nabucco project has been facing problems almost from its very start in 2002. Under the initial plan, construction was set to get started in 2011 and be completed in 2014. However, the deadline has been extended several times, as the project has been struggling to secure gas suppliers.

In May, German RWE energy concern – one of Nabucco’s main ideologists and investors – withdrew from the project after Hungary’s largest oil and gas company, MOL, said it was stepping away from Nabucco.

The key aim behind the Nabucco project was to move away from dependence on Russia’s Gazprom for deliveries of Caspian gas to Europe. Under the initial game plan the pipeline was to cross Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania and end in Austria. However, after it became clear that the pipeline wouldn’t secure enough gas, it was cut almost by half to a Nabucco West version, running from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to Baumgarten, Austria. 

Nabucco - West(Image from wikipedia.org)

Spencer Platt / Getty Images / AFP

 Household drinking water that comes from wells near known fracking sites contains levels of methane six times greater than what’s common elsewhere, a new study has found.

Researchers at Duke University sampled drinking water from 141 wells across northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York and determined that the concentration of methane, the main component of natural gas, is much higher when those wells are within one kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” sites.

Fracking is a method of drilling deep into the Earth in order to extract natural gas and has seen an emergence in recent years as an increasingly popular process used by energy companies. That spread in popularity is not without opposition from environmentalists and activists, however, who fear fracking has detrimental effects on the Earth.

According to the latest study, researchers have linked fracking sites with methane contamination several times over what is seen elsewhere. The scientists say that those high levels aren’t a direct result of the drilling, though, but caused in part by poor well construction that has allowed the water to become contaminated.

"It is looking like we are seeing a problem with well construction in some places and not others," wrote the study’s main author, Robert Jackson.

"Poor casing and cementing problems are the simplest explanation of what we found,” he said, but declined to single out well construction as the exclusive cause of the contamination.

"We need to understand why, in some cases, shale gas extraction contaminates groundwater and how to keep it from happening elsewhere," the researchers wrote.

 Jackson and his crew determined that 82 percent of the 141 water wells tested had elevated levels of methane, with other additives appearing in unusually high numbers as well. In addition to finding methane concentrations at around six times the usual level, Jackson also found ethane concentrations 23 times higher in drinking water at homes near fracking sites. In ten of the sites located within one kilometer of a drilling, propane was detected in 10 separate water samples.

“The methane, ethane and propane data, and new evidence from hydrocarbon and helium isotopes, all suggest that drilling has affected some homeowners’ water,” Jackson wrote.

Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy in Depth, told the Wall Street Journal that Jackon’s study "is not a smoking gun to say that gas drilling is a problem."

"There is methane concentration near gas wells, but there is also methane concentrations in areas where there is no gas drilling," he said. Energy in Depth, wrote the Journal, is funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Jackson’s peer-reviewed study appeared in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Nicaraguan government has an enthusiastic new investor for a project that rivals the Panama Canal and has the potential to completely change transoceanic trade.

Wang Jing, the chairman and owner of Hong Kong-based HNKD, a privately held infrastructure group, said his company has concrete plans for the ambitious project, which, in theory will break ground in 2014 and should be open for business by 2020.

Earlier this month, Nicaragua’s government granted a 50-year concession to Wang’s company for rights to build the canal.

"We don't want it to become an international joke, and we don't want it to turn into an example of Chinese investment failures," Wang said at a news conference Tuesday in Beijing, AP reports.

The Chinese government would have no involvement in the project, as China and Nicaragua at present have no diplomatic relations.

Wang said consultants on the project are US-based McKinsey & Co. and China Railway Construction Corp., China’s largest state-owned construction company.

The Nicaraguan government estimates the project will cost $40 billion, but Wang is confident the return on the investment will be high and enough to ‘make every investor smile broadly’ he said at a news conference on Tuesday in Beijing, AP reports.

The proposed 286-kilometer (178-mile) canal route to be built through Nicaragua. (Reuters)

 The 286 kilometer (178 mile) canal will cut through both land and sea, high and low elevations, and Jing concedes there are ‘a lot of conditions to be met’. There are five different routes being considered, and some variants include a ‘dry-canal’ element, transportation of goods on land between the two waterways.

The Panama Canal, considered one of the 20th century’s greatest engineering feats, is only 77 km in length.

HKND additionally received approval to build a railroad, two ports, an airport and an oil pipeline.

The source of Wang’s wealth is unclear, other than he invested in telecommunications and mining industries. On his company’s website, it says he is the chairman of more than 20 enterprises in 35 countries over the world, including Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group in China, which is also a mobile phone service provider in Nicaragua.

Some Nicaraguan lawmakers and residents have expressed concern over Wang’s business background, as well as the company, which is only newly formed.

Beating the competition

Businessmen and entrepreneurs have been after this lofty investment for over a century, and the canal would compete with Panama’s almost century-old shipping passage.

Wang’s HNKD group estimates there are 1,150 million tons of global seaborne trade each year.

“World trade has been so developed today that it needs a new canal,” Wang said. “The Panama Canal is not big enough for the trade conducted currently between East and West.”

The canal will offer another passageway to link the Atlantic and Pacific, providing another route to China and the East Coast of the US.

The idea of a canal in Nicaragua via Lake Nicaragua is a century old, and dates back to colonialism. Spain first suggested the idea, and later American businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt successfully operated a trade route between the two oceans, until civil war broke out.

The route reduced the trade route between New York and San Francisco by nearly 800 kilometers.

In 2010, Nicaragua signed a contract with two Korean developers, Dongmyeong Engineering & Architecture Consultants (DMEC) and Ox Investment to construct a deep-water port on the Atlantic coast to improve capacity.

In 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed Russian interest in the canal project, but never pursued it further.