May 18 (SeeNews) - Some 70 kilometres of line pipes for the Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector project have been delivered to both countries to date, the project company ICGB said.
"Nearly 50% of the required quantities of line pipes for the project have already been produced by the Greek company Corinth Pipeworks, which is responsible for the production and delivery. Deliveries have been distributed in five main milestones, the first two of which have already been successfully completed," ICGB said in a statement on Friday.
The manufacturing of a third batch of line pipes is ongoing.
The pipe stringing on Bulgarian territory has reached 7 km, the project company said.
Works on the project have not stopped, even though they have slowed down during the coronavirus pandemic, Bulgaria's prime minister Boyko Borissov said in a video file posted on his Facebook profile over the weekend.
Currently, works are being carried out on some 30 km of the pipeline route in Bulgaria and 14 km of the route in neighboring Greece, Bulgaria's energy minister Temenuzhka Petkova said in the video file.
Petkova hopes that by the end of May a welding machine will be delivered to Bulgaria, which will definitely speed up the construction process on the country's territory, she said.
ICGB signed contracts for the supply of pipes and construction of the interconnector with Corinth Pipeworks Industry and J&P-Avax, respectively, last year. The planned length of the pipeline is 182 km - 151 km of the interconnector will be laid on Bulgarian territory, while 31 km will be laid in Greece.
The pipeline, which has a total estimated cost of 220 million euro ($242.7 million), will connect the Greek gas transmission system in the area of Komotini to the Bulgarian gas transmission system in the area of Stara Zagora. The projected capacity will be up to 3 billion cu m per year in the direction from Greece to Bulgaria.
($ = 0.90664 euro)