Azerbaijan, Baku, July 13 / Trend A. Badalova /
Greece advocates the policy of diversification of energy sources and routes, as an important means to enhance Europe's as well as its own national energy security, Minister of Environment Energy and Climate Change, Tina Birbili, told Trend in an interview.
"For this reason the country not only supports but contributes actively to the European Union's so called Southern Corridor strategy which envisages the transportation of Caspian natural gas to Europe's markets via the Balkan Peninsula and Italy," Birbili said.
The effectiveness of this strategy requires the construction of appropriate energy infrastructure and in some cases the upgrading of existing infrastructure.
She said that our major vehicle for this is the completion of the ITGI project including the Greece-Bulgaria section.
We estimate to have the IGB completed by 2013 and the mainland section of the Greece-Italy inter-connector and the off-shore Poseidon pipeline by 2015.
"The EU has categorized the ITGI as a priority project for the development of the Southern Corridor strategy and will be contributing 1/5 of the Poseidon section and 1/3 of the costs of IGB which amount to 100 million and 45 million euro respectively," she said.
ITGI pipeline is one of the projects within the South Corridor. It envisages supplies of Azerbaijani gas to Greece and Italy. ITGI includes a modernized Turkish pipeline infrastructure, as well as projects ITG (connecting pipeline Turkey-Greece) and IGI (Greece-Italy), known as Poseidon.
Power of the planned undersea pipeline Poseidon is 8-10 billion cubic meters of gas a year. The pipeline with a length of 212 kilometers will stretch through the bottom of the Adriatic Sea from the Greek Stavrolimenasa to Italian Otranto. Italian company Edison is responsible for construction of the pipeline, which can be completed by 2012.
The planned capacity of ITGI pipeline is 11.8 billion cubic meters a year.
Greece intends to receive 3.6 billion cubic meters, and the rest - Italy. ITGI pipeline will run from Azerbaijan through Georgia (existing pipeline Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum), and Turkey to Greece and later to Italy. The pipeline will be commissioned in 2015.