June 17 (SeeNews) - Hungary expects to complete the construction of a cross-border natural gas link to Serbia by the end of 2021, foreign minister Peter Szijjarto has said.
Hungary will launch the capacity allocation procedure for the import of up to 10 billion cubic metres of gas per year from Serbia in September and will start the construction of the interconnector in the summer of 2020, Szijjarto said on Friday after the signing of a cooperation agreement on the project with Serbian energy minister Aleksandar Antic in Budapest, according to a statement by the Hungarian foreign ministry.
Hungary considers the option of buying natural gas through the transit string of Gazprom's TurkStream pipeline via Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia to be the most realistic, Szijjarto said.
The link with Serbia will provide Hungary with predictable natural gas imports in the long run as the construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Croatia has not yet begun, and an US-Austrian consortium has still not decided whether to develop the offshore fields in the Romanian section of the Black Sea, he added.
In February, Bulgarian state-owned gas transmission company Bulgartransgaz said binding nominations submitted by users total 100% of the capacity of the future pipeline on the Bulgarian-Turkish border and 100% of the capacity announced on the Bulgarian-Serbian border.
In Serbia, the procedure for the booking of capacity for the transit of natural gas via the planned pipeline was launched in April but no official data on its outcome is available yet. The total volume of available annual capacity is 395.2 GWh/day at the entry point with Bulgaria,124.2 GWh/day at exit points in Serbia and 271.02 GWh/day at the interconnection with Hungary.
The TurkStream offshore gas pipeline, stretching 930 km across the Black Sea from Russia to Turkey, will consist 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 is planned to carry gas to customers in Europe.