Dubravka Đedović Negre, the Minister of Mining and Energy of Serbia, plans to visit Azerbaijan in February 2023 to participate in a meeting of the Advisory Council on the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) project. “Minister Đedović will visit Azerbaijan in February 2023, when a high-level meeting will be held on the Southern Gas Corridor project, through which Serbia, having built an interconnector with Bulgaria, will become a transit country for European countries and will be able to satisfy its needs,” Serbian media reported.

The minister said that the construction of the Bulgaria-Serbia interconnector will be completed in 2023: “And this will enable Serbia to actually become part of the South Kazakhstan Gas Supply Network, which means large volumes of gas for us, greater reliability of supplies, greater independence.”

She also said that through a joint working group, the energy companies of Serbia and Azerbaijan will agree on the next steps in connection with the contracting of gas volumes that Serbia will import from Azerbaijan.

According to Đedović, one of the topics of discussion at the talks with the Azerbaijani side was the possibility of importing electricity from Azerbaijan.

“Thanks to cooperation and friendship, first, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, we have a platform for our further cooperation, and energy is one of the foundations of this cooperation. This means that the future project agreed by Azerbaijan with the EU, which is the construction of a submarine cable for the transmission of electricity, will also be useful to us as a transit country,” Đedović concluded.

The EU as a Project of Common Interest (PCI) support the Bulgaria-Serbia Interconnector Gas Pipeline (IBS) gas pipeline project. The length is 170 km, including the Serbian section – 108 km, 62 km – in Bulgaria.

IBS will supply Serbia via Bulgaria with gas from the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), through which gas from Azerbaijan is supplied to Europe; also, after regasification – liquefied natural gas with LNG – Alexandroupolis terminal in Greece.

Throughput capacity – more than 1.8 bcm per year with the possibility of expansion to 4 bcm, with the possibility of reverse.

Bulgaria and Serbia signed a declaration on the construction of the IBS gas pipeline in May 2018 during the EU-Western Balkans summit.

In January 2021, Zoran Mihajlović, then Minister of Mines and Energy of Serbia, stated that the construction of the Serbian section is scheduled to start in the summer of 2021 and be completed by early 2023.

The cost of the project for Serbia will cost 89 million euros, of which 49.6 million euros are EU subsidies.

On December 31, 2020, Azerbaijan began supplying gas to Europe through the TAP gas pipeline, which is the last link in the SGC

Source: Turan News Agency