The delay around the Nabucco gas pipeline continues. Meaningless meetings and declarations, seeking new partners, lack of concrete solutions … This category could easily be expanded to enlist the meeting from this week in Vienna for the future of the pipe, which was attended by energy ministers of Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria and Hungary, the European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger and surprisingly by Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, too.
The idea of the meeting was to confirm the strong legal basis for the project – the intergovernmental agreement and support for Nabucco. Ultimate result was another meaningless declaration, which they say will present in better light the conceived endeavor to producers of natural gas, consumers and financial institutions. Probably, but despite a number of similar efforts so far, the pipe still remains in the sphere of the possible scenarios. The project company for Nabucco was founded in 2004 in Vienna between the Austrian company OMV, Hungary’s MOL, Turkey BOTAS, Romanian Transgaz our Bulgargaz. Later on it was joined by the German RWE. And since then nothing big happened.
The initial plan said in 2014 Nabucco should already be delivering gas but to the present moment there have been no funding and no implemented project, as admitted EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger. For three years of work we now have four years of delay, as described the situation, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov.
The latest piece of news indicated that there are ongoing discussions to attract participants in the consortium developing the Caspian gas field Shah Deniz. These are British company BP and Norway’s Statoil with 25.5 per cent, the Azeri SOKAR, the French Total, Iranian NICO and Russian-Italian LUKAgip, all of them holding 10-percent stakes and Turkey’s TPAO with a nine-percent share. Back in May, however, BP said they refuse deliveries of natural gas for Nabucco as they considered it unprofitable. In practice, the same was confirmed at the meeting between Boyko Borisov with British Prime Minister David Cameron in August.
The British position is quite logical, since the Nabucco is already destined to play secondary role in the supply of gas to Europe. At the meeting in the Austrian capital the participants in the project company welcomed the signing of 26 June 2012 Intergovernmental Agreement on the Trans-Anatolian Project (TANAP) between Turkey and Azerbaijan. It sends Nabucco on the sidelines and gives a primary role to Turkey in gas supplies for Europe. For the so-called European project remains the abridged version – Nabucco West from the Turkish border to the Austrian Baumgarten hub in half reduced capacity compared to the initially planned 31 billion cubic meters annually.
In fact, there is hardly a better proof for the withering of Nabucco.
If you want our project for an interconnector between Bulgaria and Turkey to the first stage of Nabucco, the committee (Editor’s note: – the participating countries) can financially support our country. However, if they don’t engage, it will be built for emergency needs only before 2018, with an investment of about 100 million lev from Bulgartransgaz said Premier Boyko Borisov.
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