Azerbaijan, Baku, 3 Dec / Trend corr. T.Jafarov/ Iran intends to commence construction of a new gas pipe (Persian Pipeline) to transport its gas to Europe, as the country refuses to transport its gas via Nabucco.
According to Iran's Deputy Petroleum Minister Akbar Turkan, instead of Nabucco the country will construct Persian Pipeline with the length of 3,300 km (the distance between Iran and Europe). The total cost of the project is $6bln.
Persian Pipeline will transport Iran's gas to Europe through Turkey, Turkan said.
According to Turkan, construction of Nabucco was initiated by European countries. Iran intended to join the project. However, EU countries refused to transport Iranian gas via this pipeline due to political problems with Iran.
Implementation of the project is underway, he said.
Nabucco is a
projected trunk pipeline with the length of 3,300 km, bypassing Russia from Central Asia to EU countries, first of all Austria and Germany. Its design capacity is 26-32bln cu m of gas a year. Construction will be completed
by 2013.
The Nabucco consortium
involves OMV Gas GmbH (Austria), Botas (Turkey), Bulgargaz (Bulgaria), SNTGN Transgaz S.A. (Romania), MOL Natural Gas Transmission Company Ltd. (Hungary) and RWE (Germany).
Initially the Nabucco pipeline project, presented in 2004, envisaged gas supply
from Iran's fields in the Persian Gulf. In 2006, due to the conflict over Iran's nuclear program it was decided to change the project so that to be able to deliver gas from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.