The Nabucco consortium is considering downsizing the eponymous natural gas pipeline to roughly the half of its capacity and proposing that it would only run between Bulgaria and Austria, a report says.

The new proposal is reportedly due to low gas volumes available at the moment in the region and little interest by investors.

However, the the original project is still officially on the table, The Wall Street Journal states, citing its own sources.

Christian Dolezal, spokesman for the Nabucco consortium, stated on Friday that several scenarios are still calculated, including different sizes in terms of capacity and length of the pipeline. He added that no final decisions have been made yet.

Nabucco was initially set to carry up to 31 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from the Caspian region to Europe. It was expected to relieve Europe's dependence on Russian gas supplies.

The construction of the 4000-kilometer pipeline was set to start in 2013 and the first gas is to flow in 2017.

It was recently revealed that Turkey would no longer lend full support to the Nabucco gas pipeline project and would shift its priority to its own TANAP project

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