Nabucco Agreement will be signed in the first half of 2009

PanARMENIAN.Net - An intergovernmental agreement on the Nabucco gas pipeline will, with all certainty be signed by the end of the first half of the year, in spite of a slowdown in the process, Hungary's envoy for the project Mihály Bayer told an ad hoc parliamentary committee for preparing and implementing gas pipelines on Thursday.



The text of the agreement is expected to be finalized at an energy summit in Prague in May, Bayer said. He added it was important that the process did not lose its credibility.



The Nabucco pipeline would bring gas to Europe from Central Asia, reducing the region's energy dependence on Russia. The European Commission is expected to decide at the end of April whether to grant the Nabucco project an exemption from the European gas directive, Bayer said. He assessed as positive a decision by the EU to support the pipeline with €200 million.



Falling demand and a downturn in corporate investments because of the economic crisis could slow the implementation of the Nabucco project, Bayer said.



Bayer would not exclude the possibility of gas arriving through the pipeline from Iraq, before deliveries from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan start. "Nor should gas from Iran be excluded, considering the slowly changing relationship between the country and the US, but this will take a longer period," energyland.info cited him as saying.



Construction of pipeline is expected to begin in 2010 and is planned to be finished in 2013. It estimated to cost around €7.9 billion. The company leading the project is OMV from Austria.