Azerbaijan, Baku, June 27 / Trend V. Zhavoronkova, A. Badalova/
The final decision of the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field development consortium on the final pipeline route to transport its gas to European markets will be officially announced on Friday, a source in the Energy department of the European Commission told Trend on Thursday.
The source confirmed the information that the decision is expected to be announced in Baku.
The European Commission also added that the aim of the European Commission has always been " to open the Southern Gas Corridor for the EU in order to directly and physically link the EU gas market to the largest deposits of gas in the world in the Caspian Sea basin".
"The Commission's policy has been not to discriminate between different projects," the source in the EC said commenting the election of TAP as the project for the Southern Gas Corridor.
On Wednesday, Austrian OMV, which is a shareholder of Nabucco West project said in its official statement that the Shah Deniz Consortium did not select Nabucco West pipeline as a route for the transportation of its gas to Europe.
The second route, which was considered alongside with Nabucco, was Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), but neither the TAP, nor Shah Deniz Consortium made an official statement about the choice of the project yet.
The TAP project is designed to transport gas from the Caspian region via Greece and Albania and across the Adriatic Sea to the south of Italy and further to Western Europe. TAP's initial pipeline capacity will be 10 billion cubic metres per year, but is easily expandable to 20 billion cubic metres per year. TAP's shareholders are AXPO of Switzerland (42.5 percent), Norway's Statoil (42.5 percent) and E.ON Ruhrgas of Germany (15 percent).
Nabucco West provides for the construction of 1,300 kilometers of pipeline (Bulgaria - 412 km, Romania - 469 km, Hungary - 384 km, Austria - 47 km) from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the Austrian Baumgarten.
Nabucco West project's current shareholders are Bulgarian Energy Holding, Romanian Transgaz, Turkish Botas, Austrian OMV and Hungary's FGSZ.