November 1 (SeeNews) - Bulgaria's state-owned gas transmission system operator Bulgartransgaz said that natural gas deliveries to Romania, as well as Serbia and Hungary, were suspended early on Monday morning due to a failure on the TurkStream pipeline.
"On November 1, an emergency occurred at 3 am along the gas transmission network of Bulgartransgaz in the region of the village of Vetrino. A section of the old gas pipeline transporting gas to Romania has broken," the company said in a statement.
"Damages to the company are pecuniary, no one in the vicinity of the failure has been injured and no material damages have been inflicted on third parties," Bulgatransgaz added.
After 8 am delivery to Romania was partly restored, Bulgatransgaz also said.
As of October 1, Russia's Gazprom started supplying gas to Hungary and Croatia via TurkStream pipeline, effectively bypassing Ukraine as a transit country. Also on October 1, Serbia and Hungary officially opened a cross-border interconnection allowing natural gas flow through the TurkStream pipeline of Gazprom.
In December 2019, Serbia completed the laying on its territory of about 400 km of pipes of a string of the TurkStream pipeline for the transit of natural gas to Europe from Turkey via Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. The country received the first quantities of natural gas through Bulgaria in December 2020.
TurkStream is an export gas pipeline stretching from Russia to Turkey across the Black Sea. Its design capacity is 31.5 billion cubic meters of gas per year. One leg of TurkStream is intended to deliver gas to consumers in Turkey, while a second one is planned to supply gas to southern and southeastern Europe through Turkish territory.