Joint declaration on Eastring pipeline inked
By Aynur Karimova
Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria signed a joint declaration on May 21, backing the idea of building the Eastring gas pipeline, designed to link Central with Southeastern Europe.
However the name Eastring doesn’t appear in the document, a message posted on Euractiv portal said.
“The Parties to this document hereby declare their support for the implementation of interconnection and substantial bidirectional capacity of existing infrastructure for natural gas supply on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the Slovak Republic and for joint efforts to seek new sources and routes of diversification. The present document records political intent only. No provision of this Declaration shаll be interpreted and implemented as creating legal rights or commitments for the States of the Parties,” the document reads.
Earlier Mirek Topolánek, former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, provided ample explanation of the project where Azerbaijan together with Turkmenistan, Iraq, Cyprus and Russia is considered as a potential gas sources for forward flows.
"Eastring is a proposed pipeline, a version of which is 832 kilometers long, and runs across Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, while another version is 1274 kilometers long, and reaches Bulgaria," he said. "One of its advantages is that Eastring uses the existing infrastructure of Eustream on Slovak territory, which was completely renovated after the 2009 gas crisis."
It is designed to transport gas in both directions, with a capacity of 20 billion cubic meters a year (bcm/y) at the first stage and 40 bcm a year at the final stage. The optimistic target date for building the first stage of the pipeline is 2018.
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Aynur Karimova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on
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