BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 2. The Ionic-Adriatic pipeline will bring Azerbaijani gas to three Balkan countries, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said addressing the 48th edition of the international Cernobbio Forum, Trend reports.
"Last month in Baku, Madam Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and myself signed a Memorandum of Understanding on strategic partnership in the energy field between the European Commission and Azerbaijan. This is a very important step towards further development of our energy resources and based on that, I called it a roadmap for the future, we will plan, and I am sure we will achieve it, to double our energy – natural gas export to Europe. But for that we need to undertake important steps – political decisions, technical steps and, of course, investments, because the capacity of the Southern Gas Corridor in different segments is different. TANAP has capacity of 16 billion cubic meters. We plan to expand it up to 32 billion cubic meters and TAP has a capacity of 10 billion cubic meters and it is almost full, so we need to expand it at least to 20. That will need, of course, additional financial contribution. As a country, as an investor, we are ready to do it, but that also must be done by other members of our team. At the same time, now in Europe we see that after the Russian-Ukrainian war, the issue of natural gas became one of the most important on Europeans’ agenda and there are different projects of interconnectors. One of them, Greece-Bulgaria, is close to be inaugurated. There are other projects of that kind. There is one projects, which is called the Ionic-Adriatic pipeline, which will bring Azerbaijani gas to three Balkan countries," the head of state said.