Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov will visit Azerbaijan on July 21 and 22 for talks with President Ilham Aliyev on increasing supplies of Azerbaijani gas, Bulgarian media reported.

Bulgaria is one of three EU countries that buy gas from Azerbaijan.

Earlier, Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said that in 2022 gas supplies to Bulgaria will amount to 600 million cubic meters (for the first half of 2022 – 160 million cubic meters).

In 2021, gas supplies from Azerbaijan to Bulgaria amounted to 280 million cubic meters.

Azerbaijani gas supplies to Europe – Italy, Greece and Bulgaria – began on December 31, 2020 via the Trans-Adriatic Gas Pipeline (TAP). Due to the lack of an interconnector, the volume of deliveries to Bulgaria was several times less than planned – 250-300 million cubic meters per year instead of 1 billion cubic meters.

The Greece-Bulgaria interconnector has been launched since July 2022, which allows increasing gas supplies from Azerbaijan to Bulgaria.