Bulgaria to Start Building Gas Link with Romania August 2012

Bulgaria will launch the construction of its cross-border gas link with Romania in August, the country's Economy and Energy Minister, Delyan Dobrev, has revealed.

The gas interconnector, which will cross the river Danube at Ruse/Giurgiu, is being developed jointly by Bulgartransgaz and its Romanian counterpart Transgaz.

Experts have argued that the 25-km gas interconnector will be the least significant in terms of energy diversification among Bulgaria's planned gas links, dnevnik.bg says.

Bulgaria also plans to build gas links with three other neighbors – Turkey, Greece and Serbia – in a bid to diversify its energy supplies.

The Balkan country moved to link its natural gas grid to that of its neighbors after the January 2009 gas war between Russia and Ukraine, which cut off the Russian gas supplies to Bulgaria for full three weeks leaving it without natural gas in the middle of the winter.

In February 2011, the European Council decided that each EU member state should have at least two sources of natural gas and electricity by 2014 in order to avoid a repetition of the Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis.