Hungarian oil and gas company MOL is studying the possibility of participating in British Petroleum’s South-East Europe Pipeline (SEEP) international gas pipeline project, Nepszabadsag daily said on Monday.
The SEEP project, plans of which were revealed only a year ago, is regarded by experts as one of the most “viable” competitors of the EU-backed international Nabucco gas pipeline.
Hungary is in the process of quitting the Nabucco consortium.
SEEP would deliver ten billion cubic metres of gas per year from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz fields at the Caspian Sea from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, using existing pipelines complemented by new ones, the press chief of BP, a leader of the consortium for extracting the Shah Deniz gas, told the paper.
Hungary would have an “prominent role” in the project, Toby Odone told the paper, adding that joint working groups were studying the possibilities concerning the project’s Hungarian section.
Nabucco, planned to be a 3,800-kilometre gas pipeline carrying 31 billion cubic metres of gas from Central Asia and the Caspian region through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to Austria, has over the past years become a prestige issue for the EU, the paper noted. But the amount of gas and from which delivery point are still among questions which have yet to be resolved, it added.
