The prime ministers of Bulgaria, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) yesterday approved a long-delayed project to build an east-west oil pipeline across the Balkan peninsula.
Simeon Saxe-Coburg, Vlado Buckovski and Fatos Nano pledged their governments’ support for a $1.2 billion (890 million euro) pipeline to ship crude oil from the Caspian Sea to the West. Nano called the project “one of the most important for the regional and European integration of the Western Balkans.” After signing the documents, Ted Ferguson, chairman of the US-based Albanian, Slav-Macedonian and Bulgarian Oil Corp, which will carry out the project, said construction of the 912-kilometer (570-mile) pipeline will begin in 2005. He added that the estimated construction time is between three and four years.
The pipeline, linking Bulgaria’s Black Sea port of Burgas with the Albanian port of Vlore via FYROM, will bypass the busy Bosporus Strait in Turkey. It will be used to ship Russian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Turkmen oil transported across the Black Sea on to the markets of Western Europe and North America. It has a target capacity for financing purposes of 750,000 barrels of oil per day (35 million metric tons per year).
Energy experts are confident that another planned pipeline sending crude from Russia to Greece through Bulgaria would not threaten this project as the Caspian region was expected to yield as much as 110 million tons of oil per year from 2005.
The trans-Balkan pipeline is part of a larger infrastructure project which also includes a highway between the Black Sea and the Adriatic coast, a gas conduit, power lines and fiber-optic cables.
The EU and international financial institutions are already helping finance the project, but the three Balkan countries have repeatedly urged the Union to increase funding for the project.