22-02-2012 11:49:13

Nabucco not strategic project without its original concept: analyst

The Nabucco project will lose its strategic importance with changing its original concept and becoming a smaller pipeline than it was initially planned, a German analyst has said.

“A smaller pipeline might still be attractive for [Nabucco] consortium partners, but for the EU it loses its original meaning," Friedemann Mueller, senior advisor on international energy and climate policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, told the Baku-based Trend news agency on Monday.

Nabucco Gas Pipeline International has submitted the project's new concept to the consortium developing Azerbaijan’s offshore Shah Deniz field. The consortium's representative told Trend that, according to the new concept, which is called Nabucco West, the pipeline will be laid from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the Austrian Baumgarten. The initial concept of the 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 kilometers.

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

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

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

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

Nabucco is one of the Southern Gas Corridor projects, which is designed to transport gas from the Caspian region and Middle East to European countries. Gas to be produced during the second stage of 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.

TAGS: Nabucco project, Friedemann Mueller, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Nabucco Gas Pipeline International, Azerbaijan, Shah Deniz field, Turkish-Bulgarian border, Austrian Baumgarten, Georgian-Turkish and Iraqi-Turkish borders, Baumgarten, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria