Geopolitical map shows the countries which the Nabucco pipeline project will traverse.VIENNA: With all the necessary preparation completed for the EU's Nabucco gas pipeline, it is time for the companies involved to start building it, EU energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Thursday. "We at the (EU) Commission have worked the best we can. The preparations have now reached the stage where the companies can make their investment decision. It is now up to OMV and others to have the courage to move," Oettinger told the daily Die Presse in an interview. Nabucco is a planned 3,300-kilometer-long (2,060-mile) pipeline that will bring gas from central Asia to southeastern Europe, initially running from Azerbaijan to Ankara in Turkey and then on to Vienna. The 7.9 billion euro ($10.9 billion) project is to be built by OMV of Austria, MOL of Hungary, Romania's Transgaz, Bulgaria's Bulgargaz, BOTAS of Turkey anhd RWE of Germany and the consortium hopes to have its pipeline up and running by 2014. The EU sees Nabucco as vital to energy security following a number of third-party disputes which disrupted supplies of Russian gas to some countries in eastern and central Europe. Indeed, Nabucco is seen as a rival to another pipeline, South Stream, backed by Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom and Italy's ENI, which aims to pump Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria and then onto other European countries. Oettinger insisted that Nabucco was not intended as a snub to Russia. "Russia delivers 25 percent of our overall gas requirement. That is not going to decline, but increase," he said. "But our own gas resources are declining and so we have to import more. In the past decades, the Russians have been good partners, dependent on the euro as we are on their gas." Gas from Iraq could also be transported via Nabucco. "That's a complementary option. It's not a must, but an opportunity," Oettinger said. "I wrote to the government in December asking for a meeting. Our embassy in Baghdad is working on arranging that meeting." Meanwhile, Energy firm Heritage Oil said over the weekend that it has made a major gas find in Iraq's autonomous region of Kurdistan that is among the largest ever in the country. “The discovery of a major gas field of up to 12.3 trillion cubic feet (348 billion cubic meters) in-place with exceptional flow rates makes this one of the largest gas fields to be discovered in Iraq,” a statement said. Heritage, which was established in Canada and is listed in London and Toronto, said the field, located in the northeast of energy-rich and semi-autonomous Kurdistan, was called “Miran.” Heritage said it owned a 75 percent working interest in the field. It did not specify who held the balance. “We are considering various development options including a tie-in to planned infrastructure that will achieve first production for both oil and gas in 2015,” the company said. Heritage said it was “currently considering potential development options which could include either bringing gas into Turkey and/or into Europe via the Nabucco pipeline,” a proposed link to bring Asian supplies to Europe. “The viability of such a project, which could include construction of a pipeline to Turkey, raises concerns among investors,” said Sean Power, an analyst at City Index. Heritage has exploration operations or interests in Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Malta. – Agence France
