Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb. 21 / Trend V. Zhavoronkova/
Azerbaijan is able to push forward the idea of creating a short variant of the Nabucco gas pipeline project, which is going to connect Bulgaria and Austria and the capacity of which will be lowered by two times compared to original Nabucco project, Robert M Cutler, a senior research fellow at the Institute of European, Russian & Eurasian Studies at Carleton University said.
Nabucco Gas Pipeline International submitted the project's new conception to the Shah Deniz consortium. The consortium's official representative told Trend that, according to the new conception, which is called Nabucco West, the pipeline will be laid from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the Austrian Baumgarten. The original concept of Nabucco project envisaged the construction of the pipeline from the Georgian-Turkish and Iraqi-Turkish borders to Baumgarten. The pipeline was expected to run through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria over a distance of 3,900 kilometres.
Earlier Dow Jones Newswires reported with the reference to people familiar with the issue, that the consortium of Nabucco project proposed a pipeline which will have roughly half of Nabucco's initial capacity of 31 billion cubic meters.
"The original Nabucco has little or no chance, but the idea of shorter Nabucco offers the possibility for moving towards the creation of a wholly reversible gas ring in Southeast Europe," Cutler told Trend via e-mail.
He said that such a possibility may be implemented through a series of relatively inexpensive interconnectors formally separate from TANAP and Nabucco projects that connect with the countries which are not on the Nabucco route.
"Due to industrial history in the energy sector, such interconnectors for a gas ring are much easier to implement in Southeast and Central Europe than, for example, in Western Europe," he stressed.
Cutler said if the European Union (EU) cannot find itself able to provide a window for funding such projects, then the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) could step in through its well-established cooperation with the Central European Initiative (CEI) and the CEI's Secretariat as well as with the associated Central European Chambers of Commerce Initiative.
"By motivating such a policy implementation of such a gas ring, Azerbaijan has the possibility to decide, by favoring such a project as the new shorter Nabucco, the idea that has not yet been formally adopted by the Nabucco consortium," expert said.
He added this may help the smaller Central and Southeast European countries, which always suffer most from Russian gas cutoffs during winter.
"The reason why Azerbaijan has this possibility is that, under the terms of its agreement with Ankara, Baku will remain the owner of the gas that is exported from the western end of the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP)," expert added.
TANAP is a proposed Azerbaijan-Turkish project which envisages a construction of a pipeline from the eastern border of Turkey to the country's western border. Azerbaijan and Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding to establish the consortium that will build the gas pipeline. The cost of TANAP will be set by SOCAR and may be close to the figure of $5 billion.