Brussels, 21/05/2012 (Agence Europe) - With doubt still hanging over whether or not its project will ever be completed, the Nabucco consortium has not ruled out a reduction in its level of ambition, in terms of the capacity of the European gas pipeline project.
Though confident of the success of a broader project, Director General of the consortium building the pipeline Reinhard Mitschek has refused to rule out that a smaller sized version might be built of the Nabucco pipeline to carry gas from the Caspian region and Central Asia, via Turkey, to the European market, thereby circumventing Russia. “We are focused on both alternatives. The offer for the Nabucco base case is still on the table. Now we will work on the Nabucco West case”, Mitschek is quoted by Reuters as saying on 18 May. The initial project would see the construction of a 4,000 kilometre long pipeline with an annual capacity of 30 billion cubic metres. Last week, however, the Nabucco consortium submitted a proposal to the Shah Deniz II group, which manages extraction in the gas field of the same name in Azerbaijan, for a smaller Nabucco West version of its pipeline project, running from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to Austria and with capacity halved to 16 billion cubic metres per year. The Shah Deniz II consortium is expected to announce the winning pipeline project this summer, with a final investment decision planned for 2013.
Nabucco has six shareholders: ÖMV of Austria, Bulgargaz of Bulgaria, MOL of Hungary, Transgaz of Romania, Botas of Turkey and RWE of Germany, each having 16.67% of the shares. The projected cost is €12 billion. Nabucco is in competition with two other projects to bring the Shah Deniz II gas to Europe: the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which is led by Statoil of Norway, BP of the UK, E.ON Ruhrgas of Germany and EGL of Switzerland, and BP's South-East European Pipeline (SEEP). (EH/transl.rt)