Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated that the construction of the Trans-Caspian gas pipeline requires coordinating the positions of all Caspian Sea region states, RIA Novosti reported.
The Trans-Caspian gas pipeline is part of the Nabucco pipeline project and must connect Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan via the Caspian. Nabucco is the main competing project for South Stream in gas supply to Europe.
"It (Trans-Caspian pipeline issue) is a sufficiently complicated question, which, of course, directly depends on the status of the Caspian Sea as an internal sea, and requires coordinating the positions of all Caspian summit member states," Medvedev said at a meeting with permanent members of the UN Security Council, which was also attended by Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko and head of Gazprom Alexei Miller.
The President called natural the fact that now the topic of so-called "southern corridor" is much discussed, since the EU and other partners of Russia think about the diversification of energy supplies.
Russian gas holding "Gazprom" plans to deliver gas via South Stream directly from the producer to the consumer. The marine part of South Stream will pass via the Black Sea from Russia to the Bulgarian coast. Construction of the South Stream is expected to begin in 2013.
The first gas deliveries are scheduled for the end of 2015. Estimated capacity of the pipeline is 63 billion cubic meters of gas per year. Gazprom considers the project as a key in the strategy to diversify the routes of gas supplies to the EU.
A competing project for it is Nabucco, which is designed to transport natural gas to European countries from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan via Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Austria. It will be a continuation of the already constructed Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline and is designed for annual transportation of 30 billion cubic meters of gas.
But the question with the main gas supplier has not yet been resolved.