Hydrocarbon Energy Complexes

The editorial statement of Baku Dialogues posits a certain geographic defini­tion of what is called the “Silk Road Region,” namely “the geographic space looking west past Anatolia to the warm seas beyond; north across the Caspian towards the Great Plain and the Great Steppe; east to the peaks of the Altai and the arid sands of the Taklamakan; and south towards the Hindu Kush and the Indus valley, looping down around in the direction of the Persian Gulf and across the Fertile Crescent.”

When I served on the Executive Board of the Central Eurasian Studies Society 20 years ago, its website provided a lengthy but useful geographic definition of “Central Eurasia.” This definition included “Turkic, Mongolian, Ira­nian, Caucasian, Tibetan, and other peoples in a broad area that geo­graphically extends from the Black Sea region, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the west, through the Middle Volga region, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and on to Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet in the east.” To clarify the term “Black Sea re­gion,” which appears in that defini­tion, I adopt the European Union’s characterization of that region as stretching from Romania and Bul­garia, through northern Turkey and on to Georgia, but including only a thin coastal strip some 20‑60 kilo­meters wide within the EU itself, in­cluding the Danube delta. From that definition, it would follow that the Silk Road Region is largely em­bedded in Central Eurasia.

The name “Central Eurasia” was sometimes used in the 1990s as a shorthand for the 15 former So­viet republics together (Russia in­cluded), but this usage has faded away. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not assure the even­tual geoeconomic consolidation of Central Eurasia, but the condi­tions for that consolidation have now been established. This has oc­curred thanks to the confluence of international financial and indus­trial interest in the region’s energy resources, the political will of the United States (the only remaining superpower), and the freedom and rapidity of networked information exchanges made possible by the internet.

The Geoeconomic Approach

The fact that the Silk Road region is embedded in Central Eurasia illustrates one of the elements of the complex‑scientific approach—embeddedness in par­ticular—that informs the present essay. (I use “complex‑scientific” to mean “concerning the science of complex systems,” sometimes also called complexity science.) Herein I describe the complex‑scientific evolution of energy geoeconomics in Central Eurasia with a focus on the Caspian Sea region, and its geopolitical extensions, since the early 1990s. This article is also a non‑technical condensation of spe­cialized and scientific work on the topic in which I have been engaged for a couple of decades. Let me start by explaining what I mean by geoeconomics.

The term “geoeconomics” fo­cuses attention on how interna­tional structures constrain national choices over energy‑resource de­velopment and export (and im­port), but without determining those choices uniquely. It draws attention to how those choices feed back into the structuration of regional international systems and how these systems constellate themselves so as to configure and reconfigure “system‑level” interna­tional structures. Edward Luttwak introduced the term in its modern sense, without specific reference to energy. The approach that is proper to the analysis of Central Eurasian energy development is less neo‑Clausewitzian than his, which it modifies in an ordi­nary‑language direction. In partic­ular, it is animated by an insight of the Swiss‑American scholar Arnold Wolfers, made in the early stages of the Cold War (that then got lost in the abstractions of North American international relations theory), about levels of analysis be­tween “system” and “state‑actor.”

Foreign policy strategies are conditioned by terri­toriality, shaped by geo­graphical location, and informed by geographical understandings about the world.

That insight is the common‑sense acknowledgment that foreign policy strategies are conditioned by territoriality, shaped by geographical loca­tion, and informed by geographical understandings about the world.

The better to define geoeco­nomics, it may first be con­trasted with the geopolitics ap­proach. The latter concerns how a state’s geographical situation and natural environ­ment influence its practice of foreign policy. The intel­lectual heritage of “geopolitics,” as­sociated with such names as Alfred Thayer Mahan, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mac­kinder, and Nich­olas Spykman, is over a century old. It has been challenged by “critical geopolitics,” which seeks to unpack the discourses by which elite and publics construct spaces for political action. This latter ap­proach has led to a “neoclassical geopolitics” approach that seeks to re‑emphasize physical and geographical determinants of inter­national political action, but with a more global perspective and at­tention to non‑state actors. None of these approaches focuses specifically on international energy questions or their particular characteristics.

Another approach, the “resource scarcity” approach, identifies three types of energy scarcity: demand‑induced, supply‑induced, and “struc­tural” (which is actually supply‑in­duced but is triggered by deliberate actions of an external actor such as a state, a company, or a cartel). This approach draws useful attention to “resource nationalism”—that is to say, a government’s direct participation in natural‑resource exploitation on the territory of its state, often through a national oil and/ or gas company (sometimes called a “champion”). The resource‑scarcity approach is a useful adjunct to the geopolitical perspective, yet even together the two of them are insufficient. They do, however, point the way towards the geoeconomic approach, which underlines inter alia a state’s dependence on foreign sources of energy while taking ac­count of the given country’s domestic energy policy.

The complex‑scientific analysis of the evolution of geoeconomic energy networks draws special attention to energy pipe­line projects and the net­works that they evolve.

The complex‑scientific analysis of the evolution of geoeconomic energy networks draws special at­tention to energy pipeline projects and the networks that they evolve. In the nineteenth century, the con­struction of railroads in European states served na­tional authorities as a means for establishing and embedding cen­tral administrative power in the countryside. Today, the construction of energy pipe­lines creates axes for the international projection of influence by great powers. These pipelines sig­nify and embody cooperative stra­tegic ententes, sometimes verging on de facto political alliances among the various states.

Basic Concepts

Some interpretations presented here are new, but they have emerged from newer phenomena manifesting on the ground in the region. Even if they have evolved on the basis of older interpreta­tions, these latter are not neces­sarily invalidated, because they arose from examination at dif­ferent scales of analysis. It is part of complex‑scientific epistemology that observations may be inter­preted differently according to scale of analysis (e.g., Turco‑Caucasia vs. Central Eurasia). When the theo­ries that are used for explaining ob­servations change (with the scope of analysis), then the interpretations (of the observation language) change as well.

My earlier work occasionally presents slightly different chronol­ogies and even different names for different “hydrocarbon en­ergy complexes” (a term that I define below). Here, those have been revised so as to take into account new phenomena on the ground that have more recently emerged, eliciting new inter­pretations and slightly different chronologies. The discussion in this essay relies on four basic complex‑scientific concepts, in addition to nestedness. It is con­venient to introduce them briefly here, including a brief repetition of embeddedness, the fifth basic concept. The other four are: com­plex system, emergent coherence, hydrocarbon energy complex, and energy triangle. Each will be examined briefly in turn.

A complex system is a system having multiple interacting components, of which the overall behavior cannot be inferred simply from the behavior of the components. The canonical non‑complex system is an automo­bile factory: from studying inputs and how they are transformed, one can predict what is produced. The canonical complex system is the bi­ological cell; human societies, hu­man‑created political systems, and individual human beings are also complex systems. In the perspective employed here, a complex system is characterized by three phrases of emergent coherence. Emergence is the first phase and coherence is the last phase. They are intermediated by “autopoiesis” (meaning self‑creation or self‑production), which refers to the capacity of a complex system to establish autonomously self‑generated goals and to pursue them via evolutionary adaptation to its environment.

The next term is emergent co­herence (formally an “EAC cycle” for emergence‑autopoie­sis‑coherence), understood as a framework for analyzing and ex­plaining the extension of oil and gas pipeline networks from the Caspian Sea basin westward to Europe and eastward to China. In an EAC cycle, ‘emergence’ and ‘coherence’ have their ordinary‑language meaning. They are intermediated by autopoi­esis. Autopoietic dynamics explain the extension of hydrocarbon en­ergy pipeline networks out from the Caspian Sea basin to Europe and China.

A potential pipeline project is a complex system that interacts with its physical and human en­vironment. After it emerges as an idea, it alters its form as necessary through the working of the (evo­lutionary) principle of variation. Such altered forms then either survive (e.g., the evolution of the Baku‑Supsa oil pipeline into the Baku‑Tbilisi‑Ceyhan pipeline or fail to survive (e.g., the evolution of the Nabucco project into the Nabucco West variant, which sub­sequently died). The surviving pipeline projects are those that have cohered, through the (evolutionary) principle of selection, in a manner best adapted to their en­vironment. Not only can complex systems, including pipeline proj­ects, evolve; they can also combine and recombine into new complex systems.

It is worth remarking that the general post‑Cold War interna­tional system evolved in the same way as this. First there was a phase of the bubbling‑up of possibilities of new patterns of international re­lations, relatively free from bipolar constraints. There then followed a phase where unsustainable pat­terns of structuration of regional subsystems fell away and those still incipiently coherent settled‑down and persisted. Finally, these now‑emerged and autopoietic regional subsystems began to establish deeper‑running reciprocal rela­tions. This last development has re­inforced their coherence as well as their constrained but self‑directed autonomy, with respect to their own evolution as regional subsystems of the general international system.

I also use the term hydrocarbon energy complex (HEC). An HEC designates a regional geo­graphical construct—typically transnational or international— that is structurally unified by en­ergy flows that are, in turn, typi­cally institutionalized by oil and gas pipelines. These may now in­clude translittoral pipelines, such as Blue Stream that goes from Russia to Turkey under the Black Sea, and, if they are significant enough, transoce­anic vectors such as in the case of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The complex‑scientific nature of an HEC emerges from the fact that development, production, and pipeline transmission of en­ergy resources is a complex social system. Such a system contributes to configuring geopolitically the territories where the energy is pro­duced, transited, and consumed. Its evolution is governed by the effects of internal dynamics of social and economic growth in combination with external geopolitical con­straints.

This geoeconomic HEC approach considers pipeline networks (oil and gas transmission systems) to be complex adaptive systems, executed by human agency, that transform their human and physical economic, political, financial, and ideological environments.

Pipeline networks and their associated social systems participate in configuring and reconfiguring the geopolitics of territories where hy­drocarbon energy is pro­duced, transmitted, and consumed.  

Pipeline networks and their associated social systems thus participate in configuring and reconfiguring the geopolitics of ter­ritories where hydrocarbon energy is produced, transmitted, and con­sumed. They can alter inherited bal­ance‑of‑power geo­political patterns by unifying elements of adjacent geoeco­nomic subregions in new ways. And they can transform international re­gions and promote interregional re­structuring from the bottom up. This was most ev­ident in the circum‑Caspian lit­toral regions in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Recent geoeconomic trends—in retrospect somehow ineluctable but not predetermined—argue strongly that the Greater Central Asia re­gion, and its HEC in particular, has expanded into an East‑Central Eurasian HEC, while the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC has ex­panded into a West‑Central Eurasian HEC. The present evo­lution of the East‑Central and West‑Central Eurasian HECs—par­ticularly their emergent intercon­nections—was not pre‑determined. This evolution takes place thanks to human agency, constrained by the international and geophysical environment. This agency has pre­vented certain other tendencies of energy‑geoeconomic evolution over this same period of time. The observed energy‑geoeconomic evo­lution thus shows an aesthetically pleasing tendency toward unifica­tion. Its analysis as a phenomenon is empirically justified.

The term nestedness has al­ready been mentioned but not explained. It signifies that every region is “nested” within different scales of analysis and also, in turn, may nest other regions within itself. To take another example, Central Asia is nested within a broader yet well‑defined (transborder) mac­ro‑region of Greater Central Asia, which is in turn located within the demographic, cultural, geographic, and historical unity called Central Eurasia. Likewise, what we will call Greater Turco‑Caucasia nests Turco‑Caucasia within itself and is also itself nested within Central Eurasia as its western component. In addition, each chronological phase of emergent coherence (i.e., emergence, autopoiesis, and coher­ence) may comprise its own nested subphases of emergence, autopoiesis, and coherence; also, it may be nested in a superphase of me­ta‑emergence, meta‑autopoiesis, or meta‑coherence. Examples of how this is so are given towards the con­clusion of this essay, after the main analysis, on which it is based, has been first set out.

The concept of nestedness re­sponds to the need for a way to transcend the mere aggregation of bilateralisms that was characteristic of so much international relations theory during the life of the Cold War international system. Such multilateral arrangements have now become the norm throughout European and Eurasian geoeco­nomics, and the method of triangles may be extended to higher orders of multilateral relations. Quadrilat­eral relations, for example, may be constituted as a set of triangles. Examples of this will also be given later the present essay.

Finally, the analytical tool of energy triangles implements the insights of network sociolo­gists from the 1990s. These scholars showed that the dynamics of triads differ qualitatively from any iter­ation of dyadic relations. The Ba­ku‑Tbilisi‑Ceyhan oil pipeline was the first trilateral project imple­mented in the history of the world hydrocarbon industry, for example, and it cannot be reduced to an ag­gregation of bilateral Azerbaijan‑ Georgia, Azerbaijan‑Turkey, and Georgia‑Turkey relations.

On the Two Shores of the Caspian Sea

To recall: the complex‑sci­entific geoeconomic HEC approach considers pipelines and their networks as complex systems executed by human agency that transform the human and physical economic, political, financial, and ideological environments in which they are embedded. Energy pipe­line projects unify elements of ad­jacent geoeconomic subregions in new ways, altering the antecedent balance of power and its corre­sponding geopolitics. They signify and embody cooperative ententes, sometimes verging on de facto po­litical alliances, among different states. Oil and gas pipelines and their networks thus transform in­ternational regions and promote interregional restructuring from the bottom up.

Different periodizations of HEC evolution are possible, especially depending upon the geographic scale and level of analysis. Here I will present a straightforward and relatively unelaborated one, fo­cused on the emergent coherence of the Central Eurasian HEC; but it is necessary to start on a smaller scale and build up to that. Earlier I mentioned “Turco‑Caucasia,” and it is now time to define it.

The term “Turco‑Caucasia” signifies a certain region be­yond the South Caucasus through which the implementation of oil and gas exploitation and trans­mission projects extends. While a Central Asian HEC may be defined simply as the five post‑Soviet re­publics together located there, the Turco‑Caucasian HEC is a bit more complex. The latter would include all three South Caucasus states plus mountainous and lowland terri­tory in the North Caucasus up to the port of Novorossiysk, but not including most of the territory over which the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) eventually laid its pipeline in southern Russia from Tengiz to Novorossiysk.

The Turco‑Caucasian HEC also includes a half‑dozen Turkish provinces in the northeast of the country around the territory of the Baku‑Tbilisi‑Erzurum natural gas pipeline (now also called the South Caucasus Pipeline, SCP). Greater Central Asia and Greater Turco‑Caucasia are geographical enlargements of those two con­cepts, traced by events. Culturally, historically, and demographically, it is possible to suggest that, as a geo­political rather than a geoeconomic concept, Turco‑Caucasia may also include that part of the Anatolian peninsula east of the BTC pipe­line, northern Iraq including the Kirkuk‑Ceyhan pipeline, and a part of northern Iran populated in the majority by ethnic Azerbaijanis. However, the facts of the HECs evolution on the ground do not warrant the inclusion of Iraqi or Iranian territories in the geoeco­nomic concept of Turco‑Caucasia.

It is also possible to set dates on the evolution of Turco‑Caucasia. The region itself, as a geopolit­ical unity, fell out of its Soviet‑era configuration already by 1989; its emergent coherence as a geopolit­ical region was achieved by the end of the twentieth century. However, conceived as an energy‑geoeco­nomic entity—i.e., as the Tur­co‑Caucasian HEC—it emerged only following the provisional res­olution of ethnic conflicts that had erupted in Georgia and Azerbaijan in the late 1980s. The negotiations over both the Baku‑Chirag‑Gu­nashli oil field and the Shah Deniz natural gas deposit (and their incip­ient exploitation) are the main ac­tual developments that motivated the emergent coherence of the Turco‑Caucasian HEC from 1992 through 2003.

The Turco‑Caucasian HEC evolved autopoietically into the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC from 2004 through 2015. “Greater Turco‑Caucasia” signifies the evo­lution of geoeconomic Turco‑Cau­casia into a region of still greater scale, including the eastern part of the Anatolian peninsula. Culturally and demographically, it would en­large also to include larger swathes of the Azerbaijani‑populated re­gion in northwest Iran; however, as an energy‑geoeconomic HEC construct, Greater Turco‑Caucasia excludes that region. The construc­tion and entry into service of the BTC oil pipeline—which origi­nates in Azerbaijan’s offshore zone in the Caspian Sea, goes through Georgia and terminates at Turkey’s East Mediterranean coast—occur­ring during roughly the same time frame, was an important driving force in the geoeconomic en­largement of Turco‑Caucasia into Greater Turco‑Caucasia.

The Central Asian HEC comprised simply the five Central Asian states. The Greater Central Asian HEC includes, in ad­dition, much of the eastern North Caucasus that are not part of the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC, plus southern Siberia, western Mongolia, Xinjiang, a small part of northern Afghanistan, much of northern Pakistan, and part of northeastern Iran. The concept has historical, cultural, demographic, and geophysical bases, as well as being applicable to contemporary energy‑geoeconomic developments.

Only around the middle of the 2000s, with the geoeconomic en­largement of Central Asia into Greater Central Asia (and of Turco‑Caucasia into Greater Turco‑Caucasia), did the two re­gions on opposite sides of the Caspian Sea begin to move to­wards geoeconomic merging. Oil shipments from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea to Baku and Makhachkala ac­count for this tendency, as does the reanimation of the Trans‑Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP) project under the aegis of the European Union at that time. The clearest developments motivating the gradual merging of the two HECs— located on opposite shores of the Caspian Sea—that one sees begin­ning today to be under way, was not just the unsuccessful attempt to implement the TCGP at that time, but also the successful imple­mentation of the Caspian Pipeline Corporation (CPC) pipeline for oil from Kazakhstan’s Tengiz deposit to cross southern Russia to its Black Sea port of Novorossiysk (and the subsidiary port of Tuapse).

The CPC pipeline was a main artery of the geoeconomic enlarge­ment of Central Asia into Greater Central Asia. The geoeconomic regions of Turco‑Caucasia and Central Asia were thus not con­nected by international energy flows until sometime after the fall of the Soviet Union. Attempts at the time, largely unsuccessful, to develop further the Karachaganak gas deposit, which depends upon the Russian processing plant in Omsk, also played a role in the geoeconomic enlargement of the Central Asian HEC into the Greater Central Asian HEC. Ka­zakhstan’s supergiant offshore strike at Kashagan raised the pos­sibility (still being developed) for gas exports to be taken under the Caspian Sea through the South Caucasus to Europe. The Kazakhstan‑Caspian Transportation System (KCTS) was first sketched on the drawing‑boards at that time.

The KCTS still envisages bringing Kashagan oil onshore to enter a (still to be constructed) pipeline inside Kazakhstan from Atyrau to Kuryk, and then shipped through an undersea pipeline to Azerbaijan, whence Kashagan oil could enter the BTC pipeline for export to the world market. At the time, it was also conceived that this oil could reach Odessa under the Black Sea from Georgia, then flow east‑to‑west through the Odessa‑Brody pipeline (also called the Sarmatia pipeline) to a point near the Ukrainian‑Polish border. It was planned to construction a fur­ther pipeline from there into Poland, arriving at Plock with an eventual ex­tension to Gdansk, from where the oil could be shipped to world markets.

Also in the middle of the 2000s, when each HEC (on either side of the Caspian Sea) was reaching its autopoietic stage, it was in­tended that an extension of the Nabucco gas pipeline project (namely, the TCGP) should enter Central Asia. This pointed toward the eventual knitting‑together of the Greater Central Asian and Greater Turco‑Caucasia HECs—and their respective enlargement and trans­formation—into the West‑Central and East‑Central Eurasian HECs.

West‑Central and East‑ Central Eurasia

To summarize the narrative so far. On the western Caspian shore, the Turco‑ Caucasian HEC emerged from 1992 to 2003, developed autopoietically into the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC from 2004 to 2015, and is co­hering as the East‑Central Eurasian HEC as from 2016 until 2027. Like­wise on the eastern Caspian shore, the Central Asian HEC emerged from 1992 to 2003, developed au­topoietically into the Greater Cen­tral Asian HEC from 2004 to 2015, and is cohering as the West‑Central Eurasian HEC as from 2016 to 2027. It may or may not be a coincidence that each of these geoeconomic en­largements, into the East‑Central and West‑Central Eurasian HECs, entail the adjoinment of a fourth vertex to its respective foundational triangle. Let me explain.

Taking the energy‑triangle pos­tulate as the point of departure, it becomes clear that the triangular basis—let us call it the keystone triangle—for the Greater Central Asian HEC comprises Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. The enlargement of the Central Asian HEC into the Greater Central Asian HEC required that each of its chronological phases be characterized by the addition, to that basic Central Asian triangle, of a different strategic player: a “fourth vertex,” as it were. In each suc­ceeding phase, the previously intro­duced actors did not disappear, but a former non‑actor achieved prom­inence and drove events. Thus from 1995 to 2000, this was the United States, mainly through involve­ment in Kazakhstan; from 2001 to 2006, it was the EU (including several of its member‑states and their “national champions”), also in Kazakhstan but in some Russian regions as well; and from 2005 to 2010, it was China, which became deeply involved in all members of the original energy triangle.

By the end of this three‑phase cycle, only one of these fourth ver­tices survived as an ongoing energy partner, namely China. Competi­tion increased between China and Russia for Turkmenistan’s natural gas. Russia’s project for a refurbished Caspian Coastal Pipeline (CCP, sometimes termed ‘pre‑Caspian’ in English, following the Russian pri­kaspiiskii) went unrealized while China successfully constructed the Turkmenistan‑China gas pipeline, which also crosses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The East‑Central Eur­asian HEC then emerged on the basis of the earlier triangle plus China. This new quadrilateral, in turn, may be regarded for the purpose of analysis as four triangles, each one constructed by consecutively omitting one the quadrilateral’s vertices.

These present observations are simplified sketches of much more complex and compli­cated developments. They are not, however, reductionist, and they do not falsify any actual history. There are actually three broad schools of complex‑systems studies. One emphasizes “complex adaptive sys­tems” and studies how interactions give rise to patterns of behavior. A second, more typical of the nat­ural sciences, seeks to understand the different ways in which com­plex systems may be normatively described. The third is a cybernet­ics‑based and system theory‑ori­ented approach that looks at the process of the structural formation of complex systems through pattern formation and evolution. The last is the approach adopted here. So here we are engaged in the description of patterns that have not only emerged but also cohered through the formation and evolution of international energy‑geoeconomic structures.

Now, with respect to the West‑Central Eurasian HEC, we can say it emerged from the trian­gular basis of the Turco‑Caucasian HEC and then later the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC. This basis comprised Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkey. Fourth vertices ap­peared over time here also. Instead of one every six years, however, there has been one every 12 years. The United States was the domi­nant energy player from outside the region during the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was the U.S. that made it possible for BP to strike the “Contract of the Century” with Azerbaijan. Not just American companies but also American di­plomacy were intimately involved, in the late 1990s, in the negotiations around the first incarnation of the TCGP. However, the United States began to lose interest in the re­gion’s energy geoeconomics in the mid‑2000s, and that relative lack of interest has endured up until the present day.

It was the European Union that next entered the scene, first with the inter‑ministerial con­ference and the resulting Baku Initiative in 2004, which was the first meeting ever in which the EU and the South Caucasus and Central Asian countries discussed energy cooperation. The initiative was followed by the 2006 Astana Roadmap. The EU’s interest con­tinued with the Nabucco project, which turned into the Southern Gas Corridor with an Italian rather than an Austrian terminus. The success of this endeavor is today on the ground for everyone to see— notwithstanding the formal closure by the EU in 2016 of the underlying institutional support mechanism launched in 1995 under the mon­iker “Interstate Oil and Gas Trans­portation to Europe” and better known as INOGATE.

Following the logic of the succes­sive enlargements from the Central Asian to the East‑Central Eurasian HEC, China might be next on the scene through the 2020s. However, there are not yet any signs of this; nor, in fact, are there likely to be any such signs. Indeed, China has been and is continuing to turn its atten­tion to South Asia, in particular Pakistan and most recently Iran, the northwestern section of which was originally considered above as a part of cultural‑demographic Greater Turco‑Caucasia, but which was excluded from energy‑geoeco­nomic Greater Turco‑Caucasia.

The Southern Gas Corridor and continuing offshore developments in Azerbaijan guarantee the EU’s continuing presence in the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC. Indeed, just as China become the enduring fourth vertex that transformed the Greater Central Asian HEC (with its Kazakhstan‑Russia‑Turk­menistan keystone triangle) into the East‑Central Eurasian HEC, so the European Union appears as the enduring fourth vertex that has transformed the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC (with its Azerbaijan‑Russia‑Turkey keystone triangle) into the West‑Central Eurasian HEC.

What about other Cen­tral Eurasian HECs? If the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC grows into the West Central Eurasian HEC, if the Greater Central Asian HEC grows into the East Central Eurasian HEC, and further if these enlargements permit these complexes to merge and grow into one another, then how should the evolution over time of this phenomenon be con­ceived and periodized? To answer this question, it is necessary first to realize that although the West Central Eur­asian and East Central Eurasian HECs may to­gether define—in its broad outlines—the Central Eurasian HEC, nevertheless this is not the limit of the analysis.

If the energy geoeconomics of the 1990s and early 2000s pro­duced the HECs of Central Asia and Turco‑Caucasia, and from the early 2000s until the mid‑2010s the Central Asia HEC evolved into the Greater Central Asian HEC—and the Turco‑Caucasian HEC into the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC— then why are there no analogous developments in South Asia? During the 2000s and early 2010s, this question was in fact not yet decided. The projects of the Iran‑ Pakistan‑India pipeline, a puta­tive underwater Iran‑Oman‑India pipeline, and the Turkmeni­stan‑Afghanistan‑Pakistan‑India (TAPI) pipeline together raised the possibility of the emergence of a South Asian or Greater South Asian HEC.

The TAPI pipeline project would have played a role in con­necting a putative Greater South Asian HEC with the Greater Central Asian HEC; and also the Iranian projects with the Greater Turco‑Caucasian HEC. In the event, however, the ener­gy‑geoeconomic consolidation of neither South Asia nor Greater South Asia occurred. Had it occurred, it could have theoreti­cally further enlarged into a South‑ Central Eurasian HEC. Geo­physical limitations such as the Himalaya mountain range, as well as social‑demographic limitations such as produce political unrest the transborder Baluchistan re­gion, are among the factors that prevented such a development.

There were, however, also economic and financial constraints, not to mention political and geopolitical barriers, that could not be overcome.

Is there a North‑Central Eurasian HEC? Not really. If there were a North‑Central Eurasian HEC, it would include mainly Russian territory. But the Russian gas transmission system is still not nationally unified with a comprehensive export pipeline net­work, as for example is Turkmen­istan’s, which can export gas from any corner of the country in any di­rection. Russian President Vladimir Putin had once envisioned both the EU and China being connected up to West Siberian sources of natural gas, with his own hand on the valve to determine which direction it might flow; however, that did not come to pass.

A putative North‑Central Eurasian HEC is in fact divided between what one might call—if events continue along the paths already tentatively sketched—a Greater East‑Central Eurasian HEC and a Greater West‑Central Eurasian HEC. The former would reach all the way to Sakhalin, and even to the Kamchatka gas pro­duction center, while including as well the Yakutia and Irkutsk gas production centers and the whole Power of Siberia pipeline linking to China. The latter would include the Yamal development and other west Siberian and Arctic production centers, with their pipelines linking to the EU. However, these two en­ergy‑geoeconomic formations are still in their emergent phase. Even if they would appear to be passing from emergence to autopoiesis, their boundaries are still somewhat amorphous.

Keystone Triangle

Other work established the first three phases of evo­lution of what I now call Greater Turco‑Caucasia (the geopolitical construct, as opposed to its HEC) as 1989‑1994, 1995‑2000, and 2001‑ 2006; whereas the first three phases of the evolution of Greater Central Asia (the geopolitical construct, as opposed to its HEC) were 1995‑ 2000, 2001‑2006, and 2007‑2012. Recall that this five‑year offset is due to the fact that the post‑ Soviet transition effectively began in the South Caucasus roughly five years earlier than in Central Asia. The civil war in Georgia and the First Karabakh War all date from the mid‑ to late‑1980s. By contrast, Central Asia was the last region of the Soviet Union where the union republics declared their indepen­dence. Kazakhstan was indeed the very last, four days even after the Russian Federation did so.

The phases of the evolution of the broader‑scale Cen­tral Eurasian HECs were assigned the dates 1992‑1997, 1998‑2003, and 2004‑2009, for the reasons given above. Recalling that not only energy‑geoeconomic HECs but also chronological EAC cycles can be nested within one another, it is natural to conceive that that EAC cycle on the Central Eurasian scale, running from 1992 through 2009, may be a su­perphase of a meta‑EAC cycle. If so, then it would be followed by a superphase of meta‑autopoi­esis (embedding another EAC cycle with the three phases: 2010‑ 2015, 2016‑2021, and 2022‑2027). The projects entering into service during these years would define the axes of development for the whole of energy production—from Central Europe to Central Asia— over the entire half‑century fol­lowing the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Challenges to the stabil­ity of any international system typically begin to appear during its third superphase, which for the current system would be­gin in 2028.

Challenges to the stability of any international system typically begin to appear during its third super­phase, which for the current system would begin in 2028. The failure to govern the said challenges results in a breakdown into a transitional period to a new in­ternational system. The final super­phase—one of meta‑coherence— would fall into the period 2028‑2045. The argument in favor of this pat­tern is especially persuasive in view of the fact that a number of fore­sight scenarios (including one of my own, elaborated from the same complex‑scientific principles as set out here for studying HECs) pre­dict the downfall and collapse of the current “post‑Cold War” inter­national system in the mid‑2040s. Complex‑systems studies predict that the trigger will come in the early 2030s, and that after the mid‑ 2040s there will follow a dozen years of another “international transition” (a period coincidentally similar in length to the dozen years following the end of the Cold War).

It is interesting to note that we are near the midpoint between the origin of the present interna­tional system (the year 2001) and its breakdown. But how it breaks down is path‑de­pendent over time. The present system’s configu­ration in the late 2020s and 2030s would therefore condition the par­ticular character­istics of how that breakdown comes to pass—i.e., the “initial state” for the next interna­tional transition, which will pro­duce the point of departure for the evolution of the next interna­tional system, as from the mid‑ to late‑2050s.

The knitting‑together of the East‑Central and West‑Central Eurasian HECs into a genuine overall Central Eurasian HEC is the pivot upon which the energy geoeco­nomics of those future de­velopments will turn.

The knitting‑together of the East‑Central and West‑ Central Eurasian HECs into a gen­uine overall Central Eurasian HEC is the pivot upon which the energy geoeconomics of those future de­velopments will turn.

There can be no better cat­alyst for achieving the last­ing stability and prosperi­ty of Central Eurasia than the final realization of the fully‑fledged Trans‑Caspi­an Gas Pipeline.

For the sta­bility of the countries in the region, not to mention for the well‑being of the populations there and their eco­nomic prosperity, there can be no better catalyst than the final realiza­tion of the fully‑fledged Trans‑Cas­pian Gas Pipeline (TCGP) with its two large‑volume strings: one feeding a further expanded South Caucasus Pipeline into the Southern Gas Corridor for markets in the south of Europe, and the other crossing from Georgia under the Black Sea and making landfall in Romania (the White Stream pipeline project) for markets in Central and Eastern Europe.

Such a TCGP will assure the robust formation of the Central Eurasian keystone triangle, com­posed of Azerbaijan‑Kazakhstan‑ Turkmenistan, thus unifying the East‑Central Eurasian ener­gy‑geoeconomic keystone triangle, Azerbaijan‑Russia‑Turkey, with its Kazakhstan‑Russia‑Turkmenistan counterpart in West‑Central Eurasia.

Despite the European Green Deal, the TCGP remains an important project for Europe, for numerous reasons that have been explained elsewhere.

From the standpoint of energy geoeconomics, upon which so much of general geopolitical evo­lution today depends, the implementation of Turk­men gas exports to the EU in sizeable quantities would cement Central Asia’s ties with Europe.