Report: Official offers EU to rethink Russia’s Nord Stream-2 start

MOSCOW, Feb 11 (PRIME) -- E.U. countries must re-estimate the amount of gas which will be needed in the years to come and reconsider construction or cancelling Russia’s Nord Stream-2 pipeline project, European Commission’s Vice President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview published late Wednesday.

“It is hard for me to see Nord Stream-2 as an exclusively commercial project,” Sefcovic said. “Its construction will radically change the gas supply system in Europe.”

He also said that if Nord Stream-2 is completed, the E.U. will receive 80% of Russian gas via a single route, which is unsafe.

Russia does not want to prolong a transit contract with Ukraine in 2019, and instead in September 2015, gas giant Gazprom signed a shareholder agreement on the 55-billion-cubic-meter Nord Stream-2 pipeline, which encompasses laying two more lines of the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea to the shore of Germany.

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