Bulgaria will have to count on two prospective gas pipeline projects to secure to fulfill its recent dream and become a key player on the energy map, Austrian daily Wirtschaftsblatt says in an article.

The text is mostly focused on the now ditched South Stream pipeline and the hopes Bulgaria is pinning on alternative projects that are being put forward.

"Nobody has ever clung so much to South Stream as Bulgaria," the author, Eva Konzett, points out [DE].

Construction materials are still being delivered to the port of Varna at the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria like a "last, wistful greeting from a project for whose continuation the Bulgarian government had toiled and which now looks so far away: South Stream".

The project would have enhanced the role of Bulgaria as "an important player in the Gas Monopoly [game] between Moscow and EU."

Last year the EU Commission forced the government in Sofia into halting the pipeline's construction over incompatibility with the so-called Third Energy Package which bans pipeline owners from exclusive access of their gas to the infrastructure they have in EU member states.

"Brussels stonewalled. And Moscow defied," Wirtschaftsblatt sums up the developments.

Russia ditched the South Stream gas pipeline project, which would have carried some 63 billion cubic meters of gas via Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary to Austria and Italy, citing Sofia's reluctance to unblock construction permits.

Bulgaria "counted on thousand of millions in transit fees and now has to contemplate how [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is promising Turkish head of state Recep Tayyip Erdogan more gas."

The country could possibly "ride pickaback on the grand gas kitchen" if Slovakia's Eastring pipeline initiative is successful and the project does not engage only in transporting Western European gas to the southeast, but also vice versa.

All these observations, however, "require that Turkish Stream be built at all," Wirtschaftsblatt argues. It cites the Russian business daily RBC which recently reported that Ankara and Moscow haven't yet signed the agreement to build the pipeline.