In the EUObserver‘s article “EU digests Russia’s South Stream announcement” their correspondent writes:

Bulgarian president Rosen Plevneliev said in Sofia that South Stream can still be saved if Russia falls in line with EU rules: “If Russia agrees to comply with European law, I do not imagine anybody having objections to this project”.

But Russia will not comply with European law. North Stream asked for a received an exemption from the EU’s Third Energy Package. South Stream never asked for such an exemption. Like Blue Stream, which has never turned a profit or operated at full capacity, South Stream was never a genuine industrial project but rather a political-strategic gambit. Blue Stream succeeded in helping to disincentivize the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline project from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan in the late 1990s, and South Stream was originally intended as a blocking action against Nabucco. This failed even when Nabucco was replaced by TANAP+TAP. There was no longer any raison d’être for South Stream.

The article continues:

One senior EU diplomat told EUobserver the Turkey-Russia pipeline deal is at an early stage and may come to nothing. “Russia has signed similar ‘memorandums of understanding’ on energy projects all over the place. But it doesn’t mean they will all bear fruit”.

Of course it will come to nothing! Erdogan even denied the very next day that the MoU meant anything. Even if there were supply and demand for 63 bcm/y transiting Turkey, does anyone really think that such a project can compete with TANAP, which is operated by SOCAR with a majority stake that they will never cede (although fractions may be sold to other interested parties), which is actually being constructed, and which can supply to Europe as much gas, from the Azerbaijani offshore in the Caspian Sea, as Europe cares to take? Not to mention the agreement (finally!) between Baghdad and KRG over distribution of oil revenues, which heralds more cooperation for gas export from KRG to Turkey, which could either be consumed domestically there or fed into TANAP?

The “South Stream on land” project is nothing but a sinecure thoughtfully provided by political leaders to those who have spent the last seven years waving their hands in the air about South Stream and would otherwise have to look for jobs.