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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