New TurkStream capacity would help Gazprom honor NS1 contracts - Gazprom CEO

MOSCOW. Oct 14 (Interfax) - New TurkStream gas pipeline capacity would help Gazprom to honor the contracts of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which has been halted, Alexei Miller, the Russian gas giant's CEO, told Russia's Channel One in an interview.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday came up with the initiative of laying additional gas pipeline strings from Russia to Turkey and setting up a gas hub on the border of the European Union, which could become an alternative to other gas price discovery centers in Europe.

Gazprom once planned to build the South Stream four-string trunk pipeline across the Black Sea to Bulgaria with a capacity of 63 billion cubic meters of gas. In order to export these amounts of gas, infrastructure was being created in Russia. After the South Stream project was eventually cancelled, TurkStream, a two-string pipeline, half the size by capacity at 31.5 bcm, took its place. However, Gazprom went on creating as much capacity to deliver gas to the Black Sea coast as was initially projected.

"Regarding the volumes that may appear in the Turkish Stream corridor, the volumes of new gas transmission capacities, then we are talking about the volumes that we lost in the Baltic on the Nord Streams due to acts of international terrorism. There are existing contracts under which we used to supply gas via Nord Stream 1. We are not supplying gas under these contracts today, for reasons beyond our control. But there are these contracts, there are buyers who want to purchase these volumes," Miller said.

"I won't say now how many strings there will be - we must first decide on the volumes, of course. But in any case, this will be new gas transmission capacity across the Black Sea in the TurkStream corridor," he said.

Miller recalled that during the West's sanctions campaign against Nord Stream 2, Gazprom gained expertise at building such pipelines on its own. "We are already building offshore gas pipelines fairly quickly. We finished building Nord Stream 2 entirely on our own, no one helped us. We carried out this project at the final stage without the technological and technical participation of foreign partners at all. Gazprom alone did this. So technically and technologically, this is not difficult for us," Miller said.

He said TurkStream was a truncated version of the South Stream project: "We actually started the project in the Black Sea not with TurkStream, but with the South Stream - we even had the blueprints for capacity of 63 billion cubic meters of gas - it had already been worked out," he said.

Miller said that the new project would use Russian-made turbines: "As for the turbines, these will of course be Russian-made turbines." TurkStream's Russkaya compressor station is equipped with GPA-32 Ladoga.

Regarding the outlook for repairing Nord Stream, Miller said: "No one said that our European partners and Germany want to restore the strings that burst. The pipe is filled with sea water over a very long distance. Experts say that in order to restore the gas pipeline, it is necessary to effectively cut out a long stretch of pipe and to effectively build a new section. It must be raised, but it is not empty - hundreds of kilometers are filled with sea water."