Bulgaria is going to have to pay penalties of about EUR 0.5 B if it gives up and thus kills the Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline project, according to former PM Sergey Stanishev.

Stanishev, whose government approved the oil pipeline agreement with Russia and Greece in 2007, expressed his concerns about the polices of the current Bulgarian Cabinet during a meeting with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in Sofia.

In his words, there are delays in the realization of the joint Bulgarian-Greek economic projects but those are the fault of the Borisov government in Sofia.

“We must seek the best environmental guarantees for the Burgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline but I really doubt that environmental safety is the real motive of the Borisov Cabinet for stalling the project,” Stanishev declared.

He said that even today the Gulf of Burgas, which should be the starting point of the pipe from the Black Sea to the Aegean, is seeing the unloading of huge amounts of crude oil every single day in order to fuel the Lukoil Neftohim refinery in the city of Burgas.

In his words, the current amount of oil unloading at the port is about one-third of the total amount of crude oil which is to be delivered regularly if the pipe is to be built; however, the current oil operations at the Port of Burgas are using a technology from the 1970s.

Stanishev once again expressed his concern that Russia is accelerating its work with Turkey on the construction of the alternative Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline because it sees that the Bulgarian government is unwilling to go ahead with the Burgas-Alexandroupolis project.

He also believes the present Bulgarian government is delaying the work on the construction of the gas pipeline connection between the natural gas systems of Greece and Bulgaria, which is an EU-funded project designed to diversify Bulgaria’s energy sources.

During the first ever joint session of the governments of Bulgaria and Greece earlier on Tuesday, the Greek PM Papandreou expressed his country’s position that the Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline should be built.

The Bulgarian government is awaiting the results of an environmental assessment scheduled to come out in February 2011 but the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has declared a number of times that there was no way the assessment would be positive, and therefore no way the project could be realized. Speaking on TV on Sunday, he made it clear that Bulgaria needed to see the negative environmental assessment in order to be able to pull out of the project without having to pay all penalties that it would if it pulled out now.

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