ASHGABAT, September 24 (Itar-Tass) — Organisation of a consortium for implementation of the trans-Afghani gas pipeline /Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India/ was the key topic of the meeting in Ashgabat on Sunday, press service of Turkmenistan’s government reported on Monday.

The meeting featured core ministers from all participating counties and representatives of the Asian Development Bank /ADB/, which sponsors the project.

The meeting participants discussed the business-tour in mid-September in Singapore, New York and London to attract leading international oil and gas companies and financial institutions to the future consortium. The interest to construction of the gas pipeline was demonstrated by the US Chevron and Exxon Mobil, British BP and BG Group, Germany’s RWE, Malaysia’s Petronas, and other companies.

“The wide access for the state and regions to sources of energy resources and to means of their transportation is a geopolitical question, which is connected directly with stability of the entire international relations,” Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told the meeting. “The importance of the TAPI project is in improvement of political and social stability in the entire region.”

In 2010, Turkmenistan’s president reanimated the gas pipeline’s project, by having organised in Ashgabat a summit of the project’s four countries, where they signed an intergovernmental agreement on implementation of the project. Discussions of the project continued since mid-1990s at various levels.

The meeting in Ashgabat called Turmengaz the TAPI project’s operator. The resource base would be the country’s major deposit – Galkynysh, where according to the international audit the maximum amount of gas makes 26.2 trillion cubic metres.

The Asian Development Bank finalised the feasibility studies of TAPI in 2008, and estimates costs at 7.6 billion dollars. The Bank will finance a third of the project’s cost. The pipeline’s capacity would be over 33 billion cubic metres of gas a year, or 90 million cubic metres a day, where 14 million to be bought by Afghanistan, and India and Pakistan will buy 38 million each.