After Azerbaijan and Turkey signed an inter-governmental agreement in Istanbul on construction of Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) on June 26, Georgia started talking about another Nabucco rival project. According to local mass media, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia Grigol Vashadze announced that Georgia is ready to implement AGRI (Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector) pipeline construction project, which will supply gas from the Caspian region to Europe bypassing Russia. He also added that although Nabucco is fundamentally important project, its implementation is postponed from year to year. So Georgia offers AGRI, as it is much cheaper and much faster to carry out than Nabucco. In 2010, the presidents of Azerbaijan, Romania and Georgia signed a memorandum on implementation of the project. The AGRI is a proposed project to transport Azerbaijani natural gas to Romania and further to Central Europe. Natural gas would be transported by pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Black Sea coast of Georgia. The liquefied natural gas export terminal (LNG plant) would be built. Liquefied natural gas will be transported by LNG tankers to the Constan?a terminal in Romania. After regasification natural gas will be delivered through the existing gas grid to Romania and other European countries. According to business newspaper "Vzgliad", the prospects for Nabucco are vague, as it is too expensive. It was found that the project cost will be US$ 19 billion instead of planned 10 billion. In addition, it simply had nothing to fill, as pipeline from Azerbaijan to Europe will carry 10 billion cubic meters gas a year. This is only a third of the Nabucco capacity. So project managers decided to reduce the pipeline length of almost three times. Short version of Nabucco will be about 1300 kilometers long, and it will run across the 4 countries starting from Turkish-Bulgarian border to Austrian Baumgarten city. However Russian experts believe that AGRI Implementation chances are quiet low, because of low capacity. According to analyst Gregory Birg, AGRI project cost less than the main alternatives are considered, and may be about US$ 2-5 billion to build, depending on capacity, which may vary from 2 to 8 billion cubic meters a year. At the same time the cost of the "South stream" can reach US$ 20-25 billion (63 billion cubic meters) and the construction of Nabucco(31 billion cubic meters), according to some estimates, may be only a little cheaper.

Azerbaijan and Turkey yesterday signed an inter-governmental agreement in Istanbul on construction of Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP). Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev participated in the signing ceremony. The new pipeline will carry up to 16 billion cubic meters gas a year from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas field through Turkey as far as its European borders. The project is in direct competition with the multinational Nabucco pipeline project sponsored by a consortium that includes OMV and RWE and is baked by the European Commission, Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes. The founders of the new consortium are Azerbaijani State Oil Company with 80 percent shares, Turkish Botas oil state gas company and Turkiye Petrolleri Oil Company with 20 percent shares. In future other international oil-gas companies also may join the consortium. "We are going to solve all the issues connected with the project and without losing time pass to the construction works so that the new pipeline be ready by 2017," Rovnag Abdulayev, chairman of the Azerbaijani state oil company said. 2000 kilometers long new pipeline starts from Azerbaijan and stretches to either Greece or Bulgarian border through Turkey's territory. The first phase of the gas pipeline construction is said to cost US$ 7-8 billion.

According to Turkishnews, a new eco-friendly region plans to be built in Istanbul. A new project was named "The Yenisehir", which in Turkish means "The new city". The eco-region design was made by reputed American architect Sidney Rasekh, a founder of Urban Green Global architectural company.40 thousand hectares of land near the northern coast of Black Sea has been allocated under the construction. The new region basic concept is ecology. "The Yenisehir" should be an eco-friendly: here will be taken into account and minimized the adverse effects of such environmental factors as an unwise energy, water and food expenditure, air pollution by carbon dioxide and methane and water pollution. According to preliminary information, "The Yenisehir" will include 10 villages with population about 1 million. The eco-city will house an Olympic Village with 700 hectares total area, 2 universities and a medical center, a new airport, with 3.5 thousand hectares total area, which will reduce the workload of the Ataturk Airport.

As reported The Morning Whistle, Changsha, China's Hunan province will be home to world's tallest building, which will be built in just 7 months, if a report in local newspaper Sanxiangdushibao is to be believed. According to unconfirmed sources, the building, known as Yuanwang Mansion, will stand at 838 meters in height and have 220 floors, 50 floors more than the world’s current tallest building, Burj Khalifa. It is designed to contain residential units, hotels, schools, a hospital and offices buildings. The local Wangcheng district government has reached an agreement with Yuanda Kejian Technology Ltd. to start the building project with a total investment of at least US$ 600 million. The newspaper reported that the building can be a home for 30,400 people and will have 16 panoramic and 31 super high speed elevators capable of carrying 30 thousand people per hour to every floor. The company will be able to complete the structure so quickly because it will have a pure steel structure, and all the material will be fully prefabricated before construction. Can China set a new record in Hunan province, which housed all recently built prefab buildings? China's new propose is unbelievable, as world's current tallest building Burj Khalifa required six years to build. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a conglomerate led by Kingdom Holding Corporation is in the advanced design stage to build the one-kilometer-tall Kingdom Tower, which is expected to be finished in 2017. Recently the prefab Hotel in China's south-central Hunan province standing 30 stories was erected in an incredible 360 hours or in 15 days. The hotel built Chinese sustainable-building firm Broad Group and the building is designed to withstand up a 9.0 earthquake - and even boasts energy-efficient building techniques n 2010 Broad Group during 6 days built another prefab building, the 15-story Ark Hotel in the Changsha Province, demonstrating fantastic speed of prefab building construction. . P.S. Information source - Morning Whistle (China Business Watch) is the English-language business news, analysis and opinion aggregation service of 21st Century Media Group, China's leading financial media group.

The outlines of a massive solar thermal power plant-the largest ever-are starting to appear in the wilderness outside of Las Vegas. The US$ 2.2 billion project, which is being built by NRG Energy, Google, Oakland, California-based BrightSource and Bechtel, the engineering and construction contractor for the project, stretches over 14.5 million square meters near Ivanpah in Mojave Desert, California. When it's finished, it will generate 377 megawatts of electricity on sunny days and it will nearly double the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the US. The project has been a long time coming. BrightSource first filed an application for the project in the summer of 2007. Approval took three years and official construction started in October 2011. Crews began installing the hundreds of thousands of mirrors in February of this year. Construction was temporarily slowed to accommodate the care and relocation of desert tortoises-a threatened species-found in larger numbers than expected. The project, which will generate electricity by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat up water and drive steam turbines, is now expected to be finished next year in 2013. The Ivanpah solar thermal power plant will generate power the same way as traditional power plants - by creating high temperature steam to turn a turbine. However, instead of using fossil fuels or nuclear power to create the steam, this plant uses the sun's energy. By this way, the plant will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 400 thousand tons annually, which is equivalent of taking more than 70 thousand cars off the road. Besides this, in order to conserve scarce water resources, the plant employs an air-cooling system to convert the steam back into water in a closed-loop cycle. By using air-cooling, the new technology uses more than 90 percent less water than older technology parabolic through plants with wet cooling. Even as the project nears completion, the future of solar thermal power plants is in doubt. That's in large part because prices for solar panels-which convert sunlight to electricity directly-have dropped quickly in the last few years, causing at least one company to abandon plans to build solar thermal plants in favor of making ones that use solar panels. At least, solar thermal has one great strength compared to many other types of solar power: the heat it produces is easy to store, so electricity can be generated even after the sun goes down, and power can be dispatched to the grid whenever it's most needed. But the picture may change, as according to The CNNMoney, the US Department of Commerce last month announced it would impose punitive tariffs as high as 250 percent on panels imported from China after finding that Chinese companies have been "dumping" them at prices below production costs. As we reported earlier, on May 2011 took place ground breaking ceremony of the world's largest Blythe Solar power plant. Once construction is completed, the site will feature four solar thermal power plants with a total generating capacity of thousand megawatts of electricity. Latest development for Blythe Solar is very much unfavorable. As reported the Forbes, developer companies of the project Solar Trust of America and the Solar Millennium Group filed for bankruptcy, the former in USA and the latter in Germany.