German Gas Company Bayerngas Seeks To Become 7th Nabucco Owner

Bayerngas GmbH--a publicly owned German-Austrian gas procurement vehicle--Friday said it intends to join the Nabucco gas pipeline project that is slated to ship gas from the Caspian region and the Middle East to Central Europe via Turkey and Austria.

The company would become the seventh shareholder in the Nabucco project, which is enjoying strong political support from the European Union as a way to reduce the bloc's dependency on gas supplies from Russia.

Bayerngas and Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH separately said that talks between the prospective new consortium member and existing shareholders will now begin in order to work out the future ownership structure.

In a separate statement the Austrian economics ministry also welcomed Bayerngas' intention to take a "considerable" stake in Nabucco.

Bayerngas itself declined to say how big a stake the company will acquire in Nabucco. A company spokesman said that a final decision on Bayerngas' stake in the project is expected for 2012.

The Nabucco consortium, which includes German utility RWE AG (RWE.XE), Austria's OMV AG (OMV.VI) and Hungary's MOL Nyrt (MOL.BU), is owned by six shareholders, each of which holds approximately 16.7%.

-By Jan Hromadko, Dow Jones Newswires; [phone]; [e-mail]

(Klaus Hinkel in Frankfurt and Alessandro Torello in Brussels contributed to this article.)