Nabucco Consortium Insists On MOL Participation

Gerhard Roiss, CEO of Austria’s OMV, one of the leading members of the Nabucco gas pipeline consortium, said in an interview published on 9 May in Wirtschaftsblatt newspaper that the partners have not received official notification of MOL’s intension to withdraw from the project. The CEO of Hungary’s MOL Zsolt Hernadi had earlier confirmed the company’s plan to exit Nabucco and sell its shares in Nabucco International Company (NIC – MEES, 7 May). Mr Roiss said he still viewed “MOL as an important partner in the consortium. There is no written communication that indicates it is leaving.” While playing down the impact of MOL’s potential withdrawal on the financiability of the project, Mr Roiss played up the possibility of Nabucco being able to attract new partners, such as Germany’s Bayerngas. He also suggested that the Budapest government should extend the same privileges to NIC with regard to construction of a 320km Hungarian component of the pipeline regardless of MOL’s participation.

“There is an intergovernmental agreement that has been signed by all of the countries in the consortium. It binds them to construction of the pipeline,” Mr Roiss said. “I assume that in Europe what has been signed is respected.” He also emphasized the possibility that Nabucco could also be utilized to transport gas from a recent discovery OMV made in the Romanian sector of the Black Sea. On 22 February OMV and ExxonMobil announced the discovery of a gas field with gas in place of 1.5‐3 trillion cu ft in Romania’s Neptune block. The field could start producing by 2020, Mr Roiss said, although appraisal work would be needed to confirm the viability of the discovery (MEES, 27 February).

In related news, on 3 May Bayerngas spokesman Dirk Barz told Trend News Agency that negotiations between the German utility and the NIC partners on its participation in Nabucco should be completed within the current year. He said that Nabucco “would be the best solution to bring gas from the Caspian region to Europe.” MEES understands that Bayerngas is not close to taking a final decision on whether to join the consortium, while senior officials from the European Commission have been pressing MOL to either reverse its decision or to withhold its official notification to the NIC. The EC is concerned that a substitute for MOL in Nabucco would need to be found before the 16 May deadline set by the Shah Deniz partners for final bids by the Nabucco and South East Europe Pipeline (SEEP) consortia for selection as the Central European export route option for delivery of Shah Deniz Stage 2 gas.

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