On 31 August, at the Non-Aligned Movement Summit held in Tehran, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari, reiterated their desire to complete the Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline. The 8.7 bcm/y capacity project, which is an extension of Iran’s IGAT-8 pipeline, was 75% completed by early June 2012, (MEES, 11 June). Completion on the Iranian side is expected by the 2Q or 3Q of 2014, and is linked to a 750mn cfd sales and purchase agreement the two sides finalized in May. However, despite the fact that the project has been discussed for almost two decades, Pakistan has not even started to construct its own 800-km component. A senior Pakistani official told Pakistani daily The News on 31 August that Islamabad is going to ask a senior NIGC delegation expected to arrive in Pakistan next week, to shoulder the entire cost of the project, since it has proven impossible for Islamabad to find the necessary finance from either Russia or China. (CONTINUED - 505 WORDS)