EU reaffirms commitment to gas project

The European Union said Thursday that it was “glued” to an ambitious project to pipe natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Turkey, as Russia and Italy moved ahead with a $14.8-billion rival scheme.

The coordinator of the EU’s southeast European Nabucco pipeline project, former Dutch Foreign Minister Jozias van Aartsen, said all the participating European states were fully committed to the complex scheme after wobbles earlier this year.

“All the four countries on the European side, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, are glued to the project again and are really involved and do see the project as a priority for their countries,” Van Aartsen said at a joint news conference after talks with EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs.

The EU sees the Nabucco project, skirting Russian territory, as necessary to diversify its sources of energy and reduce dependence on Russia, which now supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas.

Piebalgs noted that Hungary’s government and natural gas company, which had earlier voiced doubts, were now back on board.

He also cited a request from Austrian regulators to allow preferential access to the pipeline for the companies involved in building it -- an exception to EU rules that require Brussels’ approval -- as further evidence that the project was on track. The energy agency would study the request, he said.

The two were speaking on the day Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom and Italy’s Eni agreed to form a joint venture to operate a gas export pipeline to southern Europe known as South Stream.

The planned 30-billion-cubic-meters a year Russian pipeline has raised questions about whether there will be enough demand, and sufficient supply, to make Nabucco viable.

Piebalgs said there was no shortage of potential supply, apart from Azerbaijan, the first expected supplier. He cited Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, as well as Egypt, Iraq and Iran, as possible suppliers to the European pipeline.

Van Aartsen said Nabucco was not an anti-Russian project but added: “The European Union in the longer term, if you look 10, 15 years ahead, cannot accept of course a monopoly of supply out of this region.”

Both men said Moscow had softened its tone against Nabucco in recent months.

“The Russian side has never been happy about Nabucco, but at least they’ve changed their language from saying it’s completely nonsense to saying ‘well OK, if you move with this, we will move with South Stream.’ So at least it is not hostile to Nabucco as it was . . . one or two years ago,” Piebalgs said.

He also rebutted accusations by Gazprom’s deputy chairman, Alexander Medvedev, that the European Commission’s energy policies were responsible for rising gasoline prices.

“The truth is that today gas prices are indexed to oil prices, so when we have a jump in oil prices, it will come back in the gas prices. That is the only reason for the announced increase in the prices for gas, it has nothing to do with the commission’s proposal,” he said.