Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 4 /Trend V. Zhavoronkova/
European Union (EU) is interested in getting direct access to the Caspian/Middle East gas fields, Nicole Bockstaller, Energy Department of the European Commission press officer, said on Tuesday.
"The aim of the EU is to have direct access to the largest field of gas in the world - the Caspian/Middle East basin," Bockstaller wrote in an e-mail to Trend.
She said that the key suppliers of the fields are Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Iraq.
"We are supporting several pipeline projects - such as Nabucco, ITGI and TAP - which aim to bring gas from this region to Europe," she added.
Nabucco is a strategic project because a completely new pipeline would be built from Austria to the Turkish-Georgian border, Bockstaller mentioned. As she said, the other two projects will build shorter pipelines which would in essence integrate existing systems in Europe and Turkey and are much smaller than Nabucco.
"The key decision which of these pipelines will be built will be taken by Azerbaijan, as it will decide to whom to give the gas from the Shah Deniz-2. Therefore, it is up to the Shah Deniz Consortium to take a decision on the submitted proposals," she added.
Bockstaller said that it is not for the EU to build or to pay for the pipelines, it can only negotiate their legal framework.
Europe is interested in cooperating with Azerbaijan in the energy sector, in particular within the Southern Gas Corridor framework.
The South Corridor is a priority EU energy project diversifying energy supply routes and sources and increasing EU energy security. The Southern Corridor includes the Nabucco gas pipeline, Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), White Stream, and ITGI (Turkey-Greece-Italy pipeline).
All this three pipeline projects, aimed at transporting Azerbaijani gas to Europe under the second phase of the project on development of the Shah Deniz gas-condensate field submitted final proposals to the Azerbaijani side.
The Azerbaijani side is going to deliver 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year to Europe under the Shah Deniz-2 project through the chosen pipeline. .
The Shah Deniz-2 consortium will review proposals submitted in accordance with previously announced criteria, including commercial attractiveness, ability for project realization from the technical and financial point of view, engineering and design work, management, coordination and transparency, the possibility of a phased scale-up and other criteria.