Russia Could Replace Bulgaria with Romania in South Stream Pipeline Project - Media

The head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, met on Friday with the chief executives of Romania’s state-owned gas pipeline operator Transgaz and gas producer Romgaz, and discussed the possibility to replace Bulgaria with Romania in the South Stream project in view of “serious problems”, Kommersant reported, quoting unnamed sources.

"Prospects of cooperation in undeground gas storage and the developing of existing transit capacities and creating new ones were discussed at the meeting,"Gazprom said in a statement on Friday.

According to Kommersant, the concept of “new transit capacities” included as radical a step as re-directing South Steam from Russia to Europe via Romania.

An agreement between Bulgaria and Russia, signed in January, envisages that a 900-kilometre undersea line from Russia would come ashore at Bulgaria’s Black Sea of Burgas.

The pipeline, initially estimated at $10 billion (7.41 billion euro) will then go south to Italy via Greece and north to Austria via Serbia and Hungary.

Bulgaria’s demands for a stake in the pipeline operator, ownership on the pipeline in the section crossing the country and a say in the distribution of transit fees interfered with Moscow’s plans for Russian ownership over the pipeline, said Kommersant.

Gazprom's press service declined to comment on Monday.

South Stream gas pipeline, to be jointly built by Gazprom and Italy's ENI, may see first deliveries in 2014, Sergei Korovin, deputy chief of Gazprom's international business department, told reporters in Sofia in a conference call from Moscow in June.

The pipeline is projected to carry some 30 billion cubic metres of gas annually to help meet rising demand in Europe. The route challenges a key Azeri gas supply project of the European Union seen as an alternative to Russian supplies, Nabucco. Russia satisfies a quarter of the European Union's energy needs and opponents of South Stream say the pipeline would make the bloc even more dependent on Russian gas supplies.

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