Developments in recent weeks make it highly likely that gas from Turkmenistan will be crossing Turkish territory to Europe within the next few years. That is the main result, for Ankara, of the announcement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in December 2017 stating that an agreement had been reached among the five Caspian Sea littoral states over the text of a convention to establish an international legal regime.
According to reports, the Astrakhan summit in September 2014 provided for agreement on 15-nautical-mile territorial waters and 10-nautical-mile exclusive fishing zones. While Lavrov clarified that an agreement had been reached to divide the sea "into national sectors," other statements by other participants suggest that this might refer only to the seabed and subsea resources.
The status of waters outside the 15 nautical-mile limit remains publicly unspecified. Russian proposals from the 1990s for common waters in the center of the sea soon disappeared from the negotiation agenda. One might therefore expect that they would not be common waters. In this case they could be considered as waters akin to those in an exclusive economic zone (EEZ), such as a zone delimited by the national seabed sectors, even if these are not formally designated EEZs.
That question is important because its answer will clarify the rules for rights of passage of military ships. Otherwise, for example, one Caspian littoral country might be able to station a vessel permanently near another's offshore energy extraction platform. National sectors of the sea, and not just the seabed, would likely eliminate such provocations, although rights of "innocent passage" would presumably remain in some form.
What is explicitly clear is that the laying of a Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP) is being established as a matter for the participating countries, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, alone.
Late last summer, at a bilateral summit in Ashgabat, the two countries for the first time signed a memorandum endorsing that principle and declaring their intent to cooperate not only in energy transmission but also in transportation and a host of other matters. Last year the European Union put the TCGP on its "List of Projects of Common Interest" (PCI List), making it eligible for preferential consideration for support from EU funding agencies and European banks.
All this is a very fortunate development for Turkey, because it opens the future possibility of off-take of Turkmenistani gas for domestic Turkish consumption, as domestic demand increases. That will have the beneficial result of allowing Turkey to decrease its high level of dependence on imports of natural gas from Russia.
Iran continues to dispute the delimitation of its national sectors with Azerbaijan and with Turkmenistan, but these are technical questions to be handled in annexes and protocols. They will not be an obstacle to the Convention itself, which will only establish the principles to be followed.
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia have already for over 10 years agreed on the limitation of boundaries of their contiguous national sectors using the international-law principle of "modified median line." The application of this principle would limit Iran's share of the Caspian to 13 percent.
International law provides two other methods for delimiting national sectors. They yield results that are almost identical to the modified median line method.
The old argument over whether the Caspian Sea should be treated under international law as a sea or an inland lake has always represented a false dichotomy. The legal regime governing the Black Sea, for example, treats it neither as a sea nor as an inland lake, but as a body of water that is unique by virtue of its situation. Turkey has had experience with that.
Like the Black Sea, the Caspian is also uniquely characterized by its geographic and special geopolitical situation. Any knowledgeable observer would have guessed, as far back as the 1990s, that a special legal regime would be tailored to the special geopolitical and geographical situation of the Caspian Sea.
Also it would have been evident that during the international-legal discussions, institutions on the ground would develop (in particular: Azerbaijan's, Kazakhstan's, and Russia's agreement on the principle of the modified median line) and would be incorporated into any final agreement.
As for the TCGP, in fact it has never been necessary for Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan to settle their dispute over the Kyapaz/Serdar development or to delimit their respective sectors, in order for energy cooperation to proceed.
In the North Sea, Norway and the United Kingdom have never agreed on the delimitation of their respective sectors. However, that has not prevented them from industrial cooperation in the exploitation of energy resources.
Both sides simply state and agree that their cooperation is without prejudice to their respective claims.
Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have always in the past, in principle, been able to proceed in that way. They may or may not agree on a definitive delimitation of their respective sectors. The point here is that the international situation around the Caspian Sea has now evolved so as to relieve political obstacles to their energy-industrial cooperation. The TCGP is very likely to be agreed upon and built in the relatively near future.
