The 1,600 Olive Trees Holding Up a $5.2 Billion Pipeline

[Rhiannon12866]

What was once a lonely fight over local farms has become a populist protest against globalization.

On a recent visit to a construction site near an olive grove along the coast of southern Italy, a reporter’s phone buzzed with an ominous text message: “We know you’re there.”

The text came from one of the people fighting to stop the final construction of a 4.5 billion-euro ($5.2 billion) natural gas pipeline that’s designed to run right beneath the olive trees, an area farmed for centuries and now surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. They have been working in shifts, monitoring progress of a project meant to carry gas from the Caspian Sea and provide the cornerstone of a European Union plan to wean itself off Russian gas.

Now their yearslong fight to block the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, known as TAP, has been given a boost. The ministers in Italy’s new government have threatened to put the project under review, aligning more with the protesters than the companies working on the pipeline, including British oil giant BP Plc and Italy’s state-owned gas company, Snam SpA. The threats have thrown into question whether the final stretch will be ready by the planned 2020 deadline—or completed at all.

The companies that invested in TAP and the larger pipeline it connects with could face billions in losses if the project is delayed, said Elchin Mammadov, a utilities analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “There is a 90% probability that it will not be ready,” he said.


More: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-05/the-1-600-olive-trees-holding-up-a-5-2-billion-pipeline