ANKARA, Turkey, May 8 (UPI) -- Kiev could help with some of the infrastructure associated with a planned natural gas through Turkey, the Ukrainian prime minister told officials in Ankara.
Turkish officials had said a memorandum of understanding for the planned 1,240-mile Trans-Anatolian Pipeline should be ratified in a matter of days. The project would eventually carry natural gas from the BP-controlled Shah Deniz field in the Azeri waters of the Caspian Sea.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, in a statement from Ankara, said Kiev wants to "both make a financial contribution and provide pipes and compressor stations" for the project.
Kiev said it was negotiating with Azerbaijan for natural gas and would look to reverse the flow of its gas transit system to import natural gas from the European Union.
The Ukrainian gas transit system hosts about 80 percent of Russian natural gas supplies bound for European consumers. Spats between Kiev and Moscow, however, have made that conventional export route risky.
The Turkish project, dubbed TANAP, could eventually link to Nabucco West, a scaled-down version of the larger $10.4 billion proposal, or BP's planned South East Europe Pipeline from the Turkish border.
