Feasibility study for project to supply Azerbaijani green energy to EU via Black Sea to be ready in a few months - Aliyev

BAKU. May 8 (Interfax) - A feasibility study for the Black Sea Energy project to lay a cable to supply green energy from Azerbaijan to Europe will be ready in a few months, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said.

"Azerbaijan is working actively on a project to lay an electricity cable [under the Black Sea] with partner countries, including Bulgaria," Aliyev said in a joint press statement with Bulgarian President Rumen Radev in Baku on Wednesday.

He said the launch of this project would enable Azerbaijan to become a supplier not only of oil and gas, but also of green energy to Europe. "The potential for this is quite considerable, and we will talk about this, including at the COP29 conference [to be held in Azerbaijan in November 2024] at the end of this year," he said.

Aliyev said trade between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria had recently increased several times. "The main reason for this is cooperation in the energy sector," he said.

Aliyev said at the end of April that the feasibility study for the Black Sea Energy was nearing completion. "European countries will need additional energy, and we are working on that. As you know, the green energy cable from Caspian to the Black Sea and then further down to Europe is now in the last phase of feasibility study. As soon as the feasibility study is ready, we will start, and we are already discussing on a practical track the opportunities of connecting this cable with Central Asia. Actually, what we are talking now is that we're expanding that project. Because, it started as a Black Sea cable from the Georgian Black Sea to the Romanian Black Sea coast. We expanded it to the Caspian Sea, and now we're expanding it further down to the Eastern Caspian, to Kazakhstan," Aliyev said at the time.

Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary signed an agreement in Bucharest on December 17, 2022, on strategic partnership, which includes the construction of an energy bridge from the Caucasus region to Europe. This involves laying the 1,195 km Black Sea Energy undersea cable with capacity of 1 GW to supply "green" electricity produced in Azerbaijan through Georgia and the Black Sea to Romania for subsequent transportation to Hungary and other European countries. A decision was reached in June for Bulgaria to join the project. Laying the cable will take three or four years. The European Commission plans to provide 2.3 billion euros for the project.