May 12 (SeeNews) - The consortium of six partners behind the Nabucco gas pipeline, a key European Union-backed project designed to carry Caspian gas to Europe, said on Tuesday it has stepped up technical planning for the 7.9 billion euro ($10.8 billion) undertaking.
Five local front end engineering and design (FEED) engineers for the five transit countries - Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, have been recently appointed and British-owned engineering consultancy Penspen now coordinates the planning efforts, the Nabucco Gas Pipeline International company said in a statement.
"These local firms are currently evaluating and investigating all technical details of the entire pipeline route to realise the necessary detailed planning," the consortium's managing director, Reinhard Mitschek, said in the statement.
The results from the technical planning will be the prerequisite for the official approvals, the output and quality specifications and for negotiations with gas suppliers.
The countries involved in the project are due to sign an intergovernmental agreement next month. "The Intergovernmental Agreement, one cornerstone in the legal framework for Nabucco, is currently under negotiations on a ministerial level and it is expected to be signed at the end of June," the statement added.
The 3,300-kilometre Nabucco pipeline will start at the Georgian/Turkish and/or Iranian/Turkish border and will link the Caspian region, the Middle East and Egypt via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary with Austria and further west with Central and Western Europe. The gas pipeline will carry 31 billion cubic metres of Caspian natural gas a year with the aim to diversify European gas supplies and decrease Europe's dependence on Russian deliveries.
The shareholders in the Nabucco Gas Pipeline International consortium are Austria's OMV, Germany's RWE, Hungary's MOL, Turkey's Botas, Bulgaria's Bulgargaz and Romania's Transgaz.
Nabucco has re-emerged as a project of strategic significance for central and eastern Europe after a price dispute between Moscow and Kiev left much of the region without Russian gas for two weeks earlier this year.
Some analysts see the pipeline as rival to the South Stream gas pipeline, a joint project of Russia's Gazprom and Italy's ENI, designed to carry 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas yearly to Austria and Italy under the Black Sea and via Bulgarian territory.
($=0.7321 euro)
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