Energy ministers of the Black Sea Cooperation Council agreed yesterday on the creation of a regional electricity and natural gas market.
The ministers, meeting in the northern Greek town of Alexandroupolis, said that member states will put effort into achieving free and secure transport of all forms of hydrocarbons (mainly oil and natural gas) throughout the area. They also pledged to speed up the connections of their national electricity grids.
For Greece, the only council member that is also a member of the European Union, the decision helps put on track several projects that concern it directly, such as the natural gas pipelines connecting Turkey, Greece and Italy as well as Greece to Slovenia and Austria. It will also serve to unblock the long-delayed Bourgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline, a project being considered for at least a decade but still at the planning stage.
Concerning the latter project, a Greek delegation under Deputy Development Minister Giorgos Salagoudis is set to visit Moscow next week to take part in a meeting with Bulgarian and Russian officials on a memorandum of cooperation. In the past, Kazakhstan had also expressed interest in the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline, which would offer an alternative to the congested shipping route through the Bosporus strait.