South Sudan and Sudan announced Aug. 4 they have reached a deal over the south's use of Khartoum's oil pipelines and distribution of oil revenues—potentially ending a dispute that prompted South Sudan to shut down its oil production in January and nearly led to war. Under the deal reached at talks in Addis Ababa, South Sudan will pay $9.48 per barrel to use one of Sudan's pipelines to export crude, and $11 to use a second leading to a refinery before reaching a sea terminal. Khartoum had originally demanded $36 per barrel.

Regional security has been seen as the biggest challenge for the planned trans-Afghan gas pipeline—officially the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project, which would pass the war-torn Afghan provinces of Herat and Kandahar as well as Pakistan's restive Baluchistan province. But recent reports of a rival pipeline project being negotiated between China, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan may pose a more fundamental threat to the TAPI. On June 6-8, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperations Organization summit in Beijing, Afghan President Hamid Karzai met with Chinese President Hu Jintao and China National Petroleum Corporation's (CNPC) head Jiang Jiemin to discuss the proposal. CNPC offered to conduct a technical and economic feasibility study for the proposed project on Afghan and Tajik territories. That the route would avoid the conflicted Pashtun-dominated areas of southern Afghanistan, making the project more attractive for investors. India's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses says the Chinese pipeline could undermine the TAPI "akin to the manner in which TAPI played spoiler to the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project." (IDSA, July 31)