Gas to Europe: Between Turkey, Russia and the Deep Black Sea

While Turkey and Russia plow along with natural gas pipelines north and south of the Black Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Romania have decided that the shortest and fastest distance between two points is a straight line.

Baku, Tbilisi and Bucharest on May 12 set up a company that will build two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals on either side of the Black Sea to get Eastern Europe the Russia-free natural gas it reportedly craves.

LNG naysayers point to the project's technical difficulties and to its lack of financing plans to argue that the trio's expectations may be getting the best of them.

Compared with the tangled Nabucco pipeline drama, however, the LNG project partners have little in the way of outstanding political issues. The project's key to success may lie in the old Russian maxim "The fewer people, the more oxygen."  ("Меньше народу, больше кислороду.")