Facts & Figures

The Nabucco legal framework - the Intergovernmental Agreement, the Project Support Agreements and the Gas Law Exemptions – support a pipeline project reaching up to the eastern and southern land borders of Turkey and with a design capacity of up to 31 billion cubic meter per year based on a 56 inch pipeline diameter. The engineering and permitting and ESIA processes have been progressed to secure this maximum technical configuration.

However, to achieve economic transport conditions, the pipeline design will have to be based on the actual demand for transportation services. This demand will be determined in the open season.  The open season is the process by which all interested shippers of gas can book transportation capacity on Nabucco. Based on the outcome of the open season, a pipeline design will be chosen that is economic, scalable and connects to those upstream pipelines through which gas producers intend to make their gas available to Europe.
To offer economical transport conditions in such circumstances, Nabucco is already preparing an alternative technical design to the maximum technical configuration. This alternative design is based on a pipeline diameter of 48 inch and a pipeline from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to Austria. This would allow for a scalable transport between 10 and 23 billion cubic meter per year.  Nabucco has given this alternative design the name “Nabucco West