Azerbaijani gas volumes are sufficient for medium-sized EU pipelines

Azerbaijani volumes are sufficient to underpin the development of a medium-sized EU pipeline such as ITGI, EU information website EurActiv reported referring to the project manager Elio Ruggeri.

Presuming that gas demand in Europe remains low until 2015, the Edison representative predicts that Azerbaijan could serve as the only gas supplier from that area, via Turkey. However, gas supplies to Europe from Azerbaijan would remain modest and could total two bcm/y, he said.

Ruggeri insisted that his company was not competing with Nabucco, which in his words was the "next phase of the southern corridor".

The Edison-favoured ITGI project (Interconnection Turkey-Greece-Italy) is more competitive in terms of cost. If Nabucco was to be built without enough gas supplies and worked at half its capacity or less, the cost of such gas would be very high for the consumer.

ITGI transport corridor which will transport Azerbaijani gas to Greece and Italy includes updated Turkish pipeline infrastructure and also ITG projects (Turkey-Greece junction pipeline) and IGI. Greece-Italy junction pipeline is a missing link of Turkey-Greece-Italy transport corridor which enables to transport gas from the Caspian region and Middle East to Italy and West Europe via Turkey and Greece. The designed carrying capacity of ITGI is 12bln cu/m per year.

When operational, ITGI would stretch from Azerbaijan across Georgia (the existing Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum pipeline) and Turkey into Greece and from there into Italy, across the Ionian Sea.


/Trend/