SOFIA, Bulgaria, June 24 (UPI) -- Despite lagging behind their neighbors, Bulgarian officials said they expect to start getting natural gas from Azerbaijan within the next three years.
The Bulgarian Economy Ministry said it expects that Azerbaijan will start shipping natural gas in some form to the country by 2014. This could come from networks through Georgia, Turkey and Greece as soon as Bulgaria completes gas network interconnections, the Sofia News Agency reports.
Bulgarian energy companies are expected to resume bilateral talks with their Azeri counterparts by August. This came as Bulgarian Energy Minister Traicho Traikov welcomed his Azeri counterpart Natig Aliyev to a regional forum this week.
Romania already has bilateral agreements set with Azerbaijan and Georgia to transport liquefied natural gas. Sofia and Baku set a 2011 deadline for Azeri gas deliveries, though bilateral agreements haven't develop as planned, the news agency adds.
BP operators at the Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan had to delay production this week because of power supply issues. Supplier timelines, meanwhile, prompted the planners of the Nabucco natural gas pipeline to delay the scheduled start date for the $11.5 billion project.
Nabucco, which relies on Azeri gas for some of its planned capacity, would extend roughly 2,000 miles through Turkish territory to Austria by crossing Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
