Bosnian Serb Republic Plans to Join South Stream

The Bosnian Serb Republic plans to join the South Stream gas pipeline project, Milorad Dodik, Prime Minister of Bosnia's Serb Republic, said on Thursday.

The Serb Republic plans to build a 480 kilometer pipeline in northern Bosnia with capacity of up to 1.5 billion cubic meters and link it to the South Stream pipeline.

Under a joint memorandum signed by Dodik and Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko, Russia’s Gazprom, which leads the South Stream consortium, will carry out a feasibility study for the project.

Earlier this month, the Bosnian Muslim-Croat federation asked for Turkey's assistance in help to diversify its sources of natural gas supply by helping it connect to the EU-backed Nabucco natural gas pipeline

Bosnia, which is made up of two autonomous regions, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic, is dependent on Russian supplies of gas via Ukraine, Hungary and Serbia to get some 350 million cubic metres of gas that it needs annually.