Bulgaria seeks to transit Azeri gas to Europe
Sofia (AFP) - Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said on Wednesday his country would seek to join Azerbaijan's new Southern Corridor to transit Caspian gas to Europe.
After talks with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliev in Sofia, Borisov said Bulgaria wants "to unfreeze the Nabucco project, or rather its part starting from the TANAP (pipeline that runs through Turkey) and Nabucco-West through Bulgaria".
The Nabucco-West pipeline is meant to get gas from the huge Shah Deniz II field in Azerbaijan via the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) through Turkey and transit it on to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria.
However, the project was ditched in mid-2013 as the Shah Deniz II consortium opted for the rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP).
TAP will chanel the Azeri gas from TANAP in Turkey on to Greece and Albania and then under the Adriatic Sea to southeast Italy, leaving out Bulgaria.
But Borisov said on Wednesday he was optimistic that Azeri gas will flow through his country.
"In the current situation there is a real chance for Azeri gas to ... be transited through our territory to neighbouring states," he said.
He planned to hold talks with the European Commission in Brussels on the project.
Bulgaria currently gets 88 percent of its gas from Russia via the highly insecure Ukraine route and has no access to other gas routes except an interconnector to Greece which can pump limited reverse flows in case of emergency.
Sofia's long-time projects to branch off its pipes to neighbouring Romania and Serbia have been severely delayed.
The Balkan country's diversification plans were also scorched by Russia's decision last December to abandon the South Stream pipeline that was intended to bring gas to Bulgaria under the Black Sea.
