More than 100 appeals for a change in the direction of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) for natural gas – approximately the number of communities along the project’s course – have been submitted so far by municipalities, private individuals and enterprises to the pipeline’s construction consortium.
Forty of these have already been approved, another 30 have been rejected and the rest are being examined on merit and on technical possibilities of changing the pipelines’s course.
TAP country manager for Greece, Rikard Skoufias, said on Wednesday that the process is under way on the initial selection of companies that will undertake the procurement of materials and services for the project’s construction in the country.
It has been ascertained so far that at least one Greek company fulfills specifications for the construction of the pipes. It is considered certain that there shall be corresponding companies for the civil engineer projects; however, there does not seem to be any Greek company with the necessary experience of attaching the pipeline’s sections – a basic element for the project’s safety, as the pipelines that have been built in Greece until now have a smaller diameter than those TAP needs.
Consequently, for the specific work the Greek companies that might be interested must become partners with companies having experience in pipelines of a large diameter (TAP’s are 42 inches in diameter). However, the timetable calls for tendering to be proclaimed at the end of 2014.
According to the plan, the pipeline will carry natural gas from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz deposit through Turkey, Greece and Albania to Italy. The pipeline’s Greek section is 550 kilometres long and is budgeted at approximately 1.5 billion euros. The project is expected to create 2,000 jobs directly and 10,000 jobs indirectly.
The pipeline’s carrying capacity will be 10 billion cubic metres of natural gas annually, with the possibility of doubling the quantity in the future and the first deliveries of gas to Europe expected in 2019.
