Bulgaria is also involved in two rival gas pipeline projects: Russia's South Stream pipeline and the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline.
Like Moscow's two-strand Siberian gas pipeline deal in the early 1980's, the Cienfuegos complex is an unprecedented "national project" with potentially decisive implications for the country's long-term energy viability, hard currency earnings structure, attraction of other foreign direct investment, access to international financial institutions and, of course, nationalistic pride.
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Another project which Mr Putin is determined should go ahead is Russia's South Stream gas pipeline, across the Black Sea and into the heart of the European Union.
When operational it will give the West access to the region's oil and gas through a pipeline that avoids Russia.
Separately, in August, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former GOP vice presidential candidate, signed a bill allowing TransCanada Alaska to build a 1, 715-mile natural gas pipeline from the North Slope's Prudhoe Bay to Alberta, Canada.
Mercosur has already stimulated efforts to improve transport and energy links a pipeline from Bolivia's ample gas fields to energy-hungry Brazil was completed last year, for example.
India, Pakistan and Iran will sign a deal this month to build a natural gas pipeline to help feed the subcontinent's desperate need for energy, a major blow to American sanctions against Tehran and a defeat for U.S. influence in South Asia.
CMS's Consumers Energy unit has 626 miles of cast- and wrought-iron pipeline in its gas system, or about 2.4 percent of the utility's total distribution system.
The U.S. is also backing a parallel natural gas pipeline through Azerbaijan.
Mr Hossain's comments followed Unocal's proposal to construct a pipeline connecting its gas fields in eastern Bangladesh to the Indian capital Delhi and the western Indian state of Gujarat.
At the same time, a Chinese bank has prominently withdrawn its financial support from a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan that the U.S. government strongly opposes.
In addition, OMV is the driving force behind the Nabucco pipeline project which will transport gas from Iran's Caspian Sea directly to Europe when completed in 2011.
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It could be another natural-gas pipeline or an electric utility, in the U.S. or outside.
That was supposed to be only a beginning: Iran's plan was to extend the pipeline so that Turkmen gas could be exported to Europe by way of Iran and Turkey.
It must be in the EU's interests to diversify away from the block's dependence on Russian gas which is why it supports pipeline projects that would bring in gas from elsewhere.
The rising supply in the U.S. could doom plans for a pipeline to ship gas from Canada and Prudhoe Bay to Chicago, Ineson said.
America's oil pipelines are largely unfettered by the rigid regulations that govern gas-pipeline tariffs.
In addition, at the end of December, it inaugurated a short pipeline from Turkmenistan to Iran, to import gas for Iran's domestic use.
Mr Humala's strategy of focusing the campaign on these issues was helped when the gas pipeline from Camisea suffered a widely publicised rupture last month, the fifth since pumping began in August 2004.
Instability in Afghanistan and the West's distrust of Iran make foreign investment in a southern or south-eastern gas pipeline unlikely.
And it agrees that the government should help to pay for a pipeline to bring Alaska's vast (and clean) natural-gas reserves to market.
Mr Davutoglu points proudly to the recent signing of an agreement between Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria on the Nabucco pipeline that is meant to carry gas through these countries, reducing Europe's dependence on Russia.
And it has lobbied the European Commission to put the Nord Stream pipeline contract under the same legal scrutiny that will apply to Poland's gas deal with Russia.
There's the slick salesman who needs billions of dollars in capital and technical know-how from the outside in order to exploit a quadrillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves (50 years' U.S. consumption) and 300, 000 miles of pipeline crisscrossing Russia from the Baltic border east to Tomsk in Siberia and from Uzbekistan north toward the Arctic Circle.
The U.S. has opposed the project, instead promoting an alternative pipeline that runs from the gas fields of Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan and then to India.
Nabucco, a trans-Balkan pipeline which aims to bring Middle Eastern and Central Asian gas to Europe via Turkey's excellent gas infrastructure, will be at the heart of the power struggle.
January's gas supply hiatus between Russia and Ukraine makes it more likely that the EU-sponsored Nabucco pipeline will be built, though it will be 2015 at the earliest before it enters service.
"A leading engineer and manufacturer of high-quality, flexible pipeline products for oil and gas transportation in the susbsea production industry, " Wellstream's acquisition demonstrates a double interest by GE to both tap the deepwater drilling business and enter one of the world's most dynamic economies in the sector, Brazil.
Add to this a proposed pipeline to carry Turkmen gas to eastern China, and Central Asia could be fuelling China's economy soon.
Having managed her state's department responsible for oil and gas exploration and exploitation, having negotiated a long-delayed natural gas pipeline through Canada to the Lower 48 and having been married for nearly two decades to a blue-collar worker in Alaska's North Slope oil fields, she knows more about the subject than all three of the others on the two parties' tickets put together.
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