Iran’s only significant gas exports re via a pipeline to Turkey that opened a decade ago. It sends 10 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey each year.
Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said Monday, “We have close cooperation with Iran in the field of natural gas, and we shared with them our unease about the gas price. We said these prices were high. They did not share the same view.”
Yildiz told a news conference, “We could not meet at the same point. It appears that arbitration—that is an international arbitration board—is inevitable.”
The minister said technical committees from the two countries were continually in talks. “But until now we have not achieved a result from the talks that we’ve been holding.”
The dispute is officially unrelated to the growing international pressure Iran faces over its nuclear program, with the European Union poised to impose sanctions on its oil industry. Some analysts, however, suspected that Turkey judged this was the time to raise the pressure on Iran over the gas price. The price has been a topic of Turkish complaint for years.
