Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s Ambassador in Washington D.C, says he’s a busy man these days lobbying the U.S. government to back the TANAP – the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline; a $7 billion project to transport Caspian gas to western Turkey and possibly beyond.

“You cannot believe how I am busy these days,” Suleymanov said in a recent interview, adding that he was meeting with key figures across the U.S. to convince them that the project is the “new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan” pipeline.

Suleymanov noted that what makes TANAP especially important is that no one is discussing the Nabucco pipeline any longer. 

TANAP’s construction is planned to begin in 2014 and to be completed by 2018. The project was announced last November in Istanbul. Four months ago, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed an agreement on the pipeline.