BP will not consider shipping gas
from its Shah Deniz Stage 2 Gas field in
Azerbaijan
through the original plans of the
Nabucco pipeline, forcing the EU-backed project to offer a smaller alternative.
In a speech on Thursday, BP chief executive of
refining and marketing
Iain
Conn
said the Shah Deniz partners were
now considering only two options for the shipping of their gas to mainland
Europe
.
One of the two was a smaller, pipeline from the
Nabucco consortium, known as 'Nabucco West", a 1300 kilometre pipeline
from the Bulgarian-Turkish border to Baumgarten in
Austria
– nearly two-thirds shorter than
the original length.
The second was the South East Europe Pipeline
(SEEP), which would mostly make use of existing pipeline infrastructure.
The
announcement comes following a decision by the OMV-led Nabucco consortium to
proceed with the development in stages, as Upstream reports inFriday’s
print edition.