Romania and energy sources
Romania will become a provider of energy security in the region, says the energy minister, Sebastian Burduja.
Ştefan Stoica, 07.04.2025, 13:50
Azerbaijan has been supplying gas to the European Union since December 2020 and has become an important alternative in the context of the energy disconnection from Russia, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, in 2022. At the end of last week, a ministerial meeting devoted to the Southern Gas Corridor was held in Baku, an opportunity for Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to announce that his country is ready to increase natural gas extraction if demand from the European Union increases. The Southern Corridor is operating at full capacity, which is why its infrastructure needs to be expanded, but this requires resources, Aliyev underlined. He welcomed the new regional projects involving Turkey and Georgia, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa pipelines.
The Southern Gas Corridor has significantly changed the gas market in Europe and contributed to reducing dependence on Russian gas, but the process is not over, the Corridor needs to be expanded, especially to the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe, the Romanian energy minister Sebastian Burduja, who participated in the Baku meeting, wrote on Facebook on Friday. He pointed out that energy must be safe, accessible and clean, in this order of priorities, one that, in his opinion, is not dictated by ideology, but by reality and common sense. According to Burduja, in the absence of the Southern Gas Corridor, Europe would have been much more vulnerable in recent years, in an extremely complicated geopolitical context. He mentioned that Romania is already a regional hub in terms of gas, given that it has functional interconnections with the neighboring countries and is involved in BRUA, a project that will involve gas transportation between Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria. At the same time, the Iași-Ungheni-Chişinău gas pipeline is fully functional and the Trans-Balkan electricity corridor has been reactivated, the Romanian energy minister has recalled.
The Black Sea, he added, also plays an increasingly important strategic role. The Neptun Deep project, with production estimated to start no later than 2027, will consolidate Romania as the largest natural gas producer in the European Union. And the extracted gas will fully cover domestic consumption and allow exports to neighboring states, so that Romania will also become a provider of energy security in the region, Burduja said. Romania, he added, supports and develops joint projects with Azerbaijan. Bucharest is part of the Green Energy Corridor, through which a submarine power cable measuring 1,195 km, which is a world record, will bring up to 4 GW of green energy between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. It already has legislation for offshore wind energy and is working on the development of the first wind farms in the Black Sea. ‘Romania is determined to be part of the solution. For us, for our neighbors, for the whole of Europe,’ Sebastian Burduja also wrote on Facebook. (LS)
