Baku anxious over Nabucco

BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Azerbaijan awaits further progress from potential suppliers for the Nabucco natural gas pipeline for Europe, the country's energy minister said.

Europe aims to diversify its regional energy sector with the Nabucco pipeline. A January gas row between Kiev and Moscow exposed vulnerabilities in the regional energy sector as roughly 80 percent of the Russian gas bound for Europe travels through Ukraine currently.

Nabucco is designed to move 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas each year to European customers from Caspian and Middle Eastern suppliers.

Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey signed a milestone intergovernmental agreement on Nabucco during a July summit in Ankara, though the project lacks firm commitments from gas supplying nations.

Natig Aliyev, the Azeri minister of energy and industry, said the supply issue was one of his concerns for Nabucco, the Trend news agency reports.

"Azerbaijan is the only resource base for Nabucco gas pipeline now. Nothing depends on us in this project now," he said. "We have done much. At present, we wait for further progress on this project."

Christian Dolezal, the spokesman for Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH, said Central Asian and Iraqi gas could develop as sources for the project.

Nabucco is scheduled to deliver gas to European customers by 2014.