Bulgaria will ask the European Commission to revive the Nabucco gas
pipeline project, and more specifically the TANAP and Nabucco - West on its
territory, prime minister Boyko Borisov said on Wednesday.
"In this way
Europe too will diversify [its gas sources] and I hope we will get full support
from the European Commission," Borisov told a news conference after meetingwith
Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev in Sofia.
For years Bulgaria has been
investing in the Nabucco project, Borisov also said.
The Nabucco pipeline
was planned to take Caspian gas from the Turkish - Bulgarian border via Bulgaria,
Romania and Hungary to the Central European Gas Hub at Baumgarten. Nabucco West,
a downsized version of the original Nabucco pipeline, was competing with the
Trans Adriatic Pipeline for access to gas from the giant Azeri Shah Deniz II
field in the Caspian Sea. However, in June 2013, the Shah Deniz Consortium
selected the Trans Adriatic Pipeline as the gas transportation
route.
TANAP will transport gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field to
Europe through Turkey. The project is expected to be completed in 2018 and to
reach annual natural gas transportation capacity of 16 billion cubic metres (cu
m) in 2020, 23 billion cu m in 2023 and 31 billion cu m in 2026. Azeri
state-owned oil and gas firm Socar owns the controlling 70% stake in TANAP
Dogalgaz Iletisim A.S., the company established to carry out the project, while
Turkish state-owned oil firm TPAO and its unit BOTAS own the remaining 30% of
the company.
Securing alternative gas supply routes has come into sharper
focus for the countries in Southeast Europe after Russia announced, in December,
it had abandoned plans to build the South Stream gas pipeline, which was planned
to carry gas from Russia under the Black Sea, making landfall in Bulgaria and
then continuing through Serbia and Hungary towards Austria. Bulgarian
authorities have said they still have not received an official notice for the
project's termination.
Bulgaria imports about 90% of the natural gas it
needs from Russia through a pipeline crossing the territories of Ukraine,
Moldova and Romania.