Bulgaria (along with Poland) were forced to not only rethink energy strategy, but act when Gazprom abruptly shut off the gas taps on April 27. Bulgaria’s room to maneuver was due to an ever-changing energy market, including new pipelines and new opportunities offered by liquified natural gas (LNG).
A gas filling station of the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (ICGB) pipeline, expected to be operational by July 2022. Credit: Nikolay Doychinov, AFP
Bulgaria (along with Poland) were forced to not only rethink energy strategy, but act when Gazprom abruptly shut off the gas taps on April 27. Bulgaria’s room to maneuver was due to an ever-changing energy market, including new pipelines and new opportunities offered by liquified natural gas (LNG).
Due to Gazprom’s price manipulation to exert pressure on the EU, it makes economic sense, explains Georgi Angelov, an analyst at Sofia’s Open Society Institute. “Over the last 20 months or so, Russian natural gas, that had cost about nine euros per megawatt, now costs about 90 euros, which is about 10 times higher,” Angelov recently told Bulgarian media. “Russia has begun artificially cutting supplies to Europe to force up prices; that is something that hadn’t happened before.”
A big part of Bulgaria’s bold new energy plans is a small pipeline. The Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (ICGB) pipeline, linking Komotini in Greece’s northeastern province of Thrace with Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria, is expected to start pumping gas in both directions in July.
Construction began in 2019 on the new 180-kilometer pipeline, which promises to bring energy security to a wider swath of Europe. The new interconnector is fused with the newly built Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which carries gas from Azerbaijan, and suppliers of LNG that arrives by ship, likely to include Qatar, Algeria, and the United States.
TAP is the final leg of the 3,500-kilometer-long Southern Gas Corridor, which brings gas from Azerbaijan’s giant Shah Deniz II field in the Caspian Sea. The Southern Gas Corridor was built to diversify the European Union’s gas supply and reduce the number of EU countries that have a single supply source, namely Russia. Southern Europe can receive Azerbaijani gas via TAP to Italy and the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) through Turkey.
“The interconnector with Greece would allow us to receive in much-larger-than-now-possible volumes of gas from Azerbaijan, which currently comes through the [TAP] and TANAP gas pipelines through the reverse connection with Greece,” said Assen Vassilev, Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister and former energy minister.
