Turkmenistan is soliciting bids to build a natural gas pipeline that will secure the Russian monopoly on exports from the Central Asian nation, Associated Press reported. Turkmenistan's Foreign Ministry said Friday that the pipeline from western Turkmenistan will stretch 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to the border with neighboring Kazakhstan as part of a new pipeline along the Caspian Sea coast to Russia that was agreed to in December. The agreement dealt a blow to the European Union's efforts to ease its energy reliance on Russia, which supplies a quarter of the EU's gas. The U.S. and the EU have pushed for construction of a trans-Caspian pipeline that would bypass Russia.
