Bulgaria President Georgi Parvanov has stressed that Bulgaria will be a key figure in allowing large scale European natural gas projects to be realized.

"Bulgaria will play an important role both in the political and the technical realization of the large-scale gas infrastructure projects in Southeastern Europe and the Black Sea - Caspian region", stated Parvanov in an interview for the Greek 'Naftemporiki' newspaper on Wednesday.

"Bulgaria can set its energy policy only in close cooperation with its neighbouring countries as they have identical geostarategic priorities and similar economic interests," stressed Parvanov, cited by the Bulgarian daily newspaper Standart.

Bulgaria's president pointed out that all planned transborder gas projects aiming to connect Russia, the Central Asian gas supplying countries, Caspian Sea and the Middle east to the European energy markets, were devised to start from or pass through four countries - Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Romania.

Answering a question about Bulgaria's contribution to Europe's further energy independence and security via diversification of the energy sources, Parvanov said: "In the last two years, we have made visits to practically all the countries, which tend to be a potential resource basis for diversification projects, supported by the EU."

Parvanov added that Bulgaria has succeeded in reaching agreements on principle with Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt about considerable amounts of gas.
"Their absorption depends on both the existing and newly constructed gas supply infrastructure, as well as on harmonizing the commercial and regulatory conditions," the President stressed.

He concluded by welcoming Greece's efforts to speed up the construction of the Burgas-Alexadroupolis pipeline. Parvanov expressed his opinion that conditions also existed for a dialogue between Bulgaria and Greece about possible investment cooperation in the sphere of nuclear power engineering.

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