OREANDA-NEWS. March 18, 2010. Gunther Oettinger, European Commissioner responsible for Energy claimed that with this ratification Turkey had shown its commitment to Nabucco.

“We should all now move forward and make full use of the Nabucco intergovernmental agreement and quickly start the construction of the pipeline for its entire length from Eastern Turkey to Austria. Nabucco has been a political priority. Now it needs to become reality,” he said.

Ratification was concluded by the publication of the ratification instrument in the Official Gazette of Turkey on 11 March. The Nabucco intergovernmental agreement puts in place the terms for transport of gas entering the Nabucco gas pipeline.  It creates a one-stop process to transport gas over the territory of five states (Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria). The agreement assigns the responsibility for the uninterrupted transportation of gas to states, backing up the guarantees made by the companies involved, and creates the conditions for solidarity amongst those states.

Nabucco is one pipeline in the EU’s Southern Corridor strategy. The Strategic aim of the Southern Corridor is to directly link the EU gas market to the Caspian / Middle East basin, which holds the largest gas reserves in the world. The key individual supplier states are Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Iraq. The key transit state and largest local market is Turkey.

Nabucco is a 3,300 km long pipeline from 3 points on the Eastern and Southern borders of Turkey to Baumgarten (near Vienna). Nabucco will deliver 31 billion cubic metres of gas per annum (bcma), which is not more than 5% of EU gas demand in 2020.

The Nabucco intergovernmental agreement has been ratified in Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, and is in the final stages of ratification in Romania.