Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb.4 /Trend/
With all the necessary preparation completed for the EU's Nabucco gas pipeline, it is time for the companies involved to start building it, EU energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Thursday, the Saudi newspaper reports citing Agence France-Presse.
"We at the (EU) Commission have worked the best we can. The preparations have now reached the stage where the companies can make their investment decision. It is now up to OMV and others to have the courage to move," Oettinger told the daily Die Presse in an interview.
The EU sees Nabucco as vital to energy security following a number of third-party disputes which disrupted supplies of Russian gas to some countries in eastern and central Europe.
Nabucco is seen as a rival to another pipeline, South Stream, backed by Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom and Italy's ENI, which aims to pump Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria and then onto other European countries.
Nabucco is a planned 3,300-kilometer-long (2,060-mile) pipeline that will bring gas from central Asia to southeastern Europe, initially running from Azerbaijan to Ankara in Turkey and then on to Vienna.
"Nabucco" is worth 7.9 billion euro, with its construction scheduled to start in 2012 and the first supplies to be commissioned in 2015. The project's participants include the Austrian OMV, Hungarian MOL, Bulgarian Bulgargaz, Romanian Transgaz, Turkish Botas and German RWE, each having an equal 16.67 percent share. The pipeline's maximum capacity will hit 31 billion cubic meters per year.