Nabucco Head: 2 Companies Interested In Joining Consortium

Two more companies are interested in joining the consortium planning to build the Nabucco pipeline to bring Caspian natural gas to Europe, the consortium's managing director said Thursday.

"We have two other interested shareholder counterparts and we start negotiations with them also quite soon," Reinhard Mitschek, managing director of Nabucco Gas Pipeline International, said during a hearing on the European Union's energy security at the European Parliament. He didn't add any detail.

His remarks come after Bayerngas GmbH, a publicly owned German-Austrian gas procurement vehicle, said it intends to join the EU-backed project.

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

Adding shareholders might prove key for the final development of the pipeline, as costs are seen rising above the initial estimate of EUR7.9 billion, and RWE, the main company in the consortium, is being financially hit by Germany's decision to exit nuclear power.

-By Alessandro Torello, Dow Jones Newswires; [phone]; [e-mail]