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Nabucco and South Stream projects to be merged

12 March 2010 12:27 (UTC +04:00)

Paolo Scaroni, chief executive officer of Eni SpA, said the move to combine the planned pipelines was "what bankers call a strategic fit," Bloomberg reported Scaroni as saying at a Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference in Houston.

"Should all partners decide to merge the two pipelines for part of the route, we would reduce investments, operational costs and increase overall returns," he added.

South Stream is a planned natural gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine, running under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, with one branch going to Greece and Italy, and another one to Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria. Another pipeline in the project phase, Nabucco, does not enjoy the favour of Russian state monopoly Gazprom. It widely resembles South Stream, but is intended to diversify the EU’s supply countries, bringing gas to Europe from the Caucasus and the Middle East to a gas hub in Austria, via Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania.