The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, arrived in energy-rich Azerbaijan on Thursday for a visit aimed at securing Caspian Sea gas supplies for European Union countries.
The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, arrived
in energy-rich
Azerbaijan
on
Thursday for a visit aimed at securing
Caspian Sea
gas
supplies for European Union countries.
Barroso and the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are expected to sign a
declaration which would commit
Baku
to
providing supplies for the EU's Southern Gas Corridor project.
The project envisages the construction of several new pipelines to bring
Caspian and Middle Eastern gas to
Europe
,
reducing their dependence on Russian energy.
The head of the EU's executive arm is expected on Friday to travel on to
Turkmenistan
,
which also has large gas reserves and is another potential source for the
proposed route to
Europe
.
"We share a strong interest in the long-term security and diversification
of our energy supply and demand," Barroso said of the two ex-Soviet
republics in a statement the day before his arrival in
Baku
.
"I will therefore make the case for the realization of the Southern Gas
Corridor, which will directly bring gas from the Caspian region to European
consumers," he said.
The E.U. sees the Southern Gas Corridor project as vital to its future energy
security following disputes that disrupted supplies of Russian gas to some
European countries.
The proposed new pipelines include Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy, White
Stream, the Trans Adriatic Pipeline and Nabucco, a 3,300-kilometre (2,050-mile)
conduit between
Turkey
and
Austria
which
has yet to secure enough supplies to make it viable.
Nabucco is a rival to another pipeline, South Stream, which is backed by Russia
and aims to pump Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria and then on to
other European countries.
Recent media reports have suggested the possibility of a partial merger between
the two competing projects after the
U.S.
ambassador to
Rome
said
that the Italian company
Eni
,
Russia
's partner
in South Stream, was considering the idea.
"Eni has changed its approach and is proposing a convergence between South
Stream and Nabucco," Ambassador David Thorne said in an interview
published in Italian newspaper La Stampa on Monday.
But the CEO of Eni, Paolo Scaroni, subsequently appeared to reject the
possibility of a merger because, he said, the Nabucco project seemed to have
stalled.
"You can't have synergy with something that doesn't exist," Scaroni
said in comments reported by La Stampa on Tuesday.
Azerbaijan
's
energy resources are coveted by its neighbors
Iran
and
Russia
as
well as by the West.
On Wednesday,
Baku
agreed a five-year deal with
Tehran
to
supply the Islamic republic with a minimum of one billion cubic meters of gas
each year.
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