Environment, Energy and Climate Change Minister Yiannis Maniatis on Tuesday said that Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev’s  recent visit to Greece  opened up the prospects for a natural gas pipeline that will run from the Aegean Sea to the shores of the Baltic, turning the country into a “gateway for energy products”.
“A great prospect is opening up for a new natural gas pipeline that will start in northern Greece, will link our network with the national network of Bulgaria and then link the Bulgarian network with Romania, Hungary and the rest of the countries right up to the Baltic,” Maniatis said.
In this way, he added, Greece will act as a gateway for energy products and its role will not be simply that of a transit country.
“Because we live at the time of the great crisis in Ukraine and Crimea, where there is a specific controversy as to how Europe can be supplied with natural gas, it is very important to highlight our own geopolitical and geoeconomic role in acting as a gateway for natural gas from the Caspian Sea, in order to distribute this to the rest of Europe and, of course, to use for our own domestic needs,” the minister said.
He repeated that the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which will transport 10 billion cubic metres of natural gas from the gas fields via of the Caspian Sea via Greece to Italy and Europe, was at the centre of the talks, as well as the privatisation of Greece’s natural gas transmission system operator DESFA.
“The final goal is to supply cheap electric power to the industries and economies of European states, so that we have competitiveness and therefore new jobs and can fight the scourge of unemployment, he said. The next goal was to supply cheap electric power to European households, where more than 50 million EU citizens were faced with energy poverty, he added.