Greece-Bulgaria Pipe Garners Nine Responses

Nine companies have submitted non-binding expressions of interest to book capacity in the proposed Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector.

ICGB, the company in charge of building the planned gas pipeline, said April 28 that they added up to 4.3bn m³/year south-north and 1bn m³/yr north-south, and described the outcome as satisfactory.

ICGB said the deadline was April 8, in accordance with previous deadline extensions approved by the two countries’ energy regulators, Bulgaria’s EWRC and Greece’s RAE.

The market test now moves into second, binding bidding phase, once it has the approval of the regulators, and that will allow the pipeline to be sized according to contracts. The plan at the moment is for 3bn m³/yr in south-north flow, which can be expanded to 5bn m³/yr by adding compression, ICGB told NGE. The project cost has been put at €220mn, assuming 3bn m³/yr. The European Union, under its energy programme for recovery, may cover a fifth of that, ICGB said.

In a statement, ICGB said the pipeline would allow gas from the proposed southern corridor to permeate into southeast Europe, as well as provide an outlet for regasified LNG delivered to Greece.

ICGB’s shareholders are state-owned transmission system operator Bulgaria Energy Holding (50%) and IGI Poseidon (50%). IGI Poseidon is registered in Greece, with shareholders Greek public gas corporation Depa (50%) and EDF's Italian subsidiary Edison (50%).

Since February, Edison and Depa also have an agreement with Russian export monopoly Gazprom to work on a new version of South Stream which envisages Russian gas crossing the Black Sea from east to west to Greece and Italy through unnamed third countries, widely understood to mean Bulgaria. European Commission and US officials have roundly attacked the idea as a white elephant.

William Powell