Bulgaria, Turkey agree new gas interconnector

SOFIA - Agence France-Presse

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Bulgaria and Turkey agreed on Friday to set up a joint company and build a gas pipeline to link their networks and enable imports, Bulgaria's economy and energy minister said.
 
"We took a concrete decision for building an interconnector Bulgaria-Turkey that will be a key source of diversification of natural gas deliveries for our country," Dragomir Stoynev said after talks in Sofia with his Turkish counterpart Taner Yildiz.
 
Bulgaria is largely dependent on Russian gas supplies via troubled Ukraine. The small Balkan state was among the worst hit by repeated Moscow-Kiev price spats that resulted in cuts to deliveries.
 
The EU state began looking several years ago for supplies from its neighbours -- Greece, Romania, Serbia and especially Turkey, which imports Iranian and Azerbaijan gas.
 
"It is important that we now have concrete actions and not only political intentions as we saw over the past years," Yildiz said on Friday.
 
Sofia and Ankara expect to sign in March a deal about the concrete parameters and the cost of the gas link and set up a joint company to plan and operate it. The 191 kilometre (119 miles) pipeline would then take about two years to build, the ministers said.
 
The ministers did not disclose the possible capacity of the pipeline, nor its cost. Bulgaria consumes some 3 billion cubic meters of gas per year.