BANJA LUKA (Bosnia and Herzegovina), October 9 (SeeNews) – Bosnia's Serb Republic plans to launch in 2020 the construction of a gas pipeline linking Serbia's Belgrade to the entity's main city of Banja Luka as a branch of the TurkStream pipeline of Russia's Gazprom, Russian media reported.
“The Serb Republic is ready for the project, we have already taken all the necessary decisions - the government in May, and the municipalities in July, when we determined the route for the highway to Belgrade," TASS news agency quoted the Serb Republic's energy minister Petar Djokic as saying on Monday. "We decided that the gas pipeline will run along the highway."
The pipeline project will start in parallel with the launch of the highway construction, Djokic said.
In July, Bosnian road company Autoputevi Republike Srpske and Turkish civil engineering company Tasyapi signed a memorandum of understanding for the construction of parts of Sarajevo - Belgrade motorway on the territory of the Serb Republic. The MoU concerns the northern leg of the motorway, from Raca to Brcko, as well as the southern leg, from East Sarajevo to Visegrad and Vardiste.
Gazprom plans to build a string of its TurkStream pipeline for transmission of Russian natural gas to Europe from Turkey via Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. Serbia has already started the construction of its 403 km-long section of the transit pipeline from the border with Bulgaria to the border with Hungary and plans to complete it in December. The offshore section of the TurkStream stretching 930 km across the Black Sea from Russia to Turkey consists of two parallel strings with annual throughput capacity of 15.75 billion cubic metres of gas each. One string is intended for consumers in Turkey, while the second will carry gas to customers in Europe.
The Serb Republic is one of two autonomous entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina. The other one is the Federation.