A top European Union official said Friday that the presence of a sixth partner in the multinational Nabucco consortium did not exclude future partners in the project, the Turkish Daily reports.

Jozias van Aarsten, EU special coordinator for the Nabucco gas pipeline project, said one of the elements he discussed during two-day meetings with Turkish officials was Ankara’s reluctance to accept Gaz de France as the seventh partner in the Nabucco consortium for political reasons. He said, when Germany’s energy company RWE joined the project earlier this month in Vienna as the sixth partner, all the members of the Nabucco consortium including Turkey’s state-owned pipeline company Botaş made clear that “the sixth partner does not exclude future partners.” The consortium is owned by Austria’s OMV, Hungary’s MOL, Turkey’s Botaş, Bulgaria’s Bulgargaz, Romania’s Transgaz and Germany’s RWE.

OMV currently owns 39% of the shares of Turkey’s Petrol Ofisi, whose majority shares belong to Doğan Holding. TurkeyFrance’s objections to its bid to join the EU and by French moves to make denying claims of Armenian genocide a crime. A senior Turkish Energy Ministry official told the Turkish Daily News last week that France was acting as the EU’s flag waver concerning the Armenian question and Ankara’s EU aspirations and therefore, it was not possible for Turkey to give a nod to the French company’s participation in the Nabucco consortium. has been angered by

In the meantime, a delegation, led by the French foreign trade minister, was scheduled to start a visit to Turkey late yesterday, to try among other things to overcome Ankara’s objections to Gaz de France. On the Nabucco project, the EU official said the technical discussions about the pricing mechanism will continue between Turkish officials and EU experts in the next two weeks. He added he will come back to Turkey for further talks in three weeks. Aarsten said the feasibility studies on the Nabucco pipeline were about to be concluded in mid-summer or in September. He said an intergovernmental conference whose vice-chair will be Turkey will meet in the spring. “I can say that Nabucco is becoming a near reality,” he said.

The EU coordinator said the Nabucco pipeline was a priority for the EU and emphasized that Turkish officials expressed their commitment to the project during the meetings. “Relations between Turkey and the EU on energy is a strategic one, for now and for the future when Turkey becomes a member of the EU,” he added. Nabucco will carry natural gas from the Caspian region and the Middle East to Central and Western Europe. It was devised as a means to diversify gas supplies and reduce energy dependency on Russia. The project aims to deliver 30 billion cubic meters of gas from Central Asia and the Caspian region to Europe through a 3,300-kilometer pipeline from Turkey through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Austria. Construction is scheduled for as early as this year, with it expected to become operational in 2012. The cost of the project is estimated to be €5 billion, said van Aarsten.

Questions remain as to whether the Nabucco project can find sufficient gas supplies to make it worthwhile. In December, Russia scored a major victory when it signed a deal with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan for those countries’ Caspian Sea gas supplies to flow through Russia, draining the main potential source for Nabucco. In another blow to Nabucco, Russia also cut deals with Bulgaria and Serbia for the South Stream pipeline, which will carry Central Asian gas to Europe. Van Aarsten said however, he did not regard the South Stream pipeline as an alternative to Nabucco but said it will help diversify supplies. “There is no competition,” he said. “The more pipelines, the better it is.”