Azerbaijan, Baku, July 13 / Trend A. Badalova /
Greece will be the first EU member-state to use Azerbaijani gas,Minister of Environment Energy and Climate Change, Tina Birbili, told Trend in an interview.
This is our common goal, she said.
"It will open the way for Azerbaijani gas to flow to other EU member-states through the new Italy-Greece-Turkey inter-connector," she said.
The gas pipeline Turkey-Greece-Italy (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. ITGI will be planned in 2015.
ITGI pipeline will run from Azerbaijan through Georgia (existing pipeline Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum), and Turkey to Greece and later to Italy.
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
While we are working hard to increase the use of Renewable sources in our energy mix and establish energy efficiency measures in line with the EU's policy, the increased use of natural gas is definitely part of our strategy, she said.
Greece consumes between 3.5 - 4 BCM. By 2015, this will increase about 5BCM in order to meet demands of gas-fired electricity plants for domestic needs, she said.
Today Greece purchases about 57 percent of its pipe gas from Russia, 20 percent from Turkey. The rest is LNG of which 15 percent is bought from Algeria.