'Nabucco will lose its strategic importance with changes'

Nabucco project will lose its strategic importance with changing its original conception and becoming smaller pipeline than it was initially planned, senior advisor on international energy and climate policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, Friedemann Mueller believes.

"A smaller pipeline might still be attractive for [Nabucco] consortium partners, but for the EU it looses its original meaning," Mueller told Trend on Monday.

Nabucco Gas Pipeline International submitted the project's new conception to the Shah Deniz consortium. The consortium's official representative told Trend that, according to the new conception, which is called Nabucco West, the pipeline will be laid from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the Austrian Baumgarten. The original concept of Nabucco project envisaged the construction of the pipeline from the Georgian-Turkish and Iraqi-Turkish borders to Baumgarten. The pipeline was expected to run through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria over a distance of 3,900 kilometres.

Earlier Dow Jones Newswires reported with the reference to people familiar with the issue, that the consortium of Nabucco project proposed a pipeline which will have roughly half of Nabucco's initial capacity of 31 billion cubic meters.

Mueller said that Nabucco project from a Brussels standpoint was seen as a strategic step towards the diversification of energy supplies, as well as a major infrastructure measure to get access to the natural gas richest region in the world, which is the region in the triangle South Caspian Sea - Persian Gulf - North Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Mueller believes that if Nabucco is downsized to much smaller capacity, it cannot be called "strategic" any more, because it reduces the dependence on Russia only minimal, and does not include the option to invite natural gas from other countries but Azerbaijan to fill the pipeline later.

"The major problem for Nabucco project is the missing progress on getting gas from Turkmenistan and/or Iraq into the pipeline, Mueller believes.

Nabucco gas pipeline is one of the Southern gas Corridor projects, which is designed to transport gas from the Caspian region and Middle east to the European countries. Gas to be produced during the second stage of Azerbaijani Shah Deniz gas condensate field development is considered as the main source for Nabucco.

The project's shareholders include Bulgarian Energy Holding, Turkish Botas, Austrian OMV, German RWE, Hungary's FGSZ and Romanian Transgaz.


/Trend/