BELGRADE, Mar 28 Serbia plans to purchase up to 3.5 million cubic meters of gas per day from an LNG terminal in Alexandroupolis, Greece, and deliver them through an interconnector with Bulgaria under construction Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said.
Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou is in Serbia on a three-day visit. On Tuesday, she had a closed-door meeting with Vučić, followed by a plenary meeting of two government delegations.
«We currently have 528 million cubic meters of gas reserves, these are considerable reserves for our country, and they are growing, because there is permission to place another 100 million cubic meters in the Banatski Dvor underground gas storage in its Russian part, there is also an agreement with the Hungarians, to supplement the storage facility that we rented in Hungary from our partners. So we will provide reserves of over 700 million cubic meters of gas, which was not possible earlier in our history,» the Serbian leader said at a joint press conference.
He agreed with Sakellaropoulu that natural gas consumption rises sharply due to cooling during the heating season and can reach 16 million cubic meters per day in Serbia in winter.
“Therefore, we talked with our Greek partners about Alexandroupolis being easier for us, so that we could use it at the same moment when we complete the connecting gas pipeline with Bulgaria in October, where we could receive from 3 to 3.5 million cubic meters daily if necessary,» the President of Serbia said.
Vucic and Bulgarian President Rumen Radev opened on February 1 the construction of a connecting gas pipeline (interconnector) on Bulgarian territory to diversify blue fuel supplies from Azerbaijan, Greece and other sources alternative to Russia.
Serbian authorities previously announced a planned purchase from Azerbaijan in 2023 through a connecting gas pipeline with Bulgaria in volumes of 1.4 billion cubic meters per year. In Serbia, laying began on February 1, 2022.
The Nish-Dimitrovgrad interconnector under construction, with a length of 109 kilometers on the Serbian side, is expected to cost Belgrade about 90 million euros, of which 49.6 million are EU subsidies, and the European Investment Bank has provided a loan of 25 million Euro. According to the plan, the capacity of the gas pipeline will be over 1.8 billion cubic meters of gas per year.
On October 1, 2022, the head of the Serbian state attended the opening of the interconnector — a connecting gas pipeline between Greece and Bulgaria with a length of 182 kilometers from the Greek city of Komotini to the Bulgarian Stara Zagora. The pipeline with a capacity of three billion cubic meters of gas per year with the possibility of increasing volumes up to five billion cubic meters is designed for gas from Azerbaijan within the framework of the Trans Adriatic Gas Pipeline (TAP) and the terminal for liquefied natural gas in Alexandroupolis.
At the moment, Russia is the only supplier of natural gas to Serbia. Official Belgrade, under a two-year agreement with Gazprom, has provided about 2.2 billion cubic meters per year, or 62% of its annual gas needs, and plans to reserve about 700 million cubic meters of gas for the winter on its territory and in Hungary.