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According to this article, BRUA gas pipeline project seems to be on hold after a surprise decision coming from Hungary:

The Hungarian transmission system operator FGSZ took the European gas market by surprise on Friday when it announced it was no longer in a position to hold an open season on the Romanian-Hungarian-Austrian section of the pipeline.

Instead, FGSZ noted, the only ‘economically viable’ part of the Bulgaria-Hungary-Romania-Austria (BRUA) pipeline would be the existing Romania-Hungary interconnector, which could be expanded from its current capacity of 4.4 billion cubic metres (bcm) to 5.26bmc/year.

FGSZ said it had contacted the Romanian grid operator Transgaz with a view to conduct an open season procedure just on this point. The procedure would have an almost identical draft for the Romania-Hungary project only.

Question: Why does Hungary not seem to support anymore the original project? This project should support a less dependent EU on Russian gas.

BRUE pipe on map

Alexei
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    At first glance your link seems to be the primary source, and the discussion didn't make it into Hungarian news sources other than by citing the latter. Also, the answer seems to be in the question (it's more economical to expand an existing pipeline). Can you elaborate on what you're actually looking for? – Denis de Bernardy Aug 17 '17 at 13:51
  • @DenisdeBernardy - I also suspect a political dimension of the decision since the article mentions: Russia’s Gazprom may be able to use the existing infrastructure to sell Russian gas to the region. and that companies which expect to export the Black Sea gas, including the US ExxonMobil, or Austria’s OMV could be locked out of regional exports.. However these are not elaborated and thus I came to Politics.SE with this question. – Alexei Aug 17 '17 at 15:50
  • @SJuan76 - yes, that is right and I have removed the "hasty conclusion". However, my question remains. – Alexei Aug 17 '17 at 16:45
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    Orbán is a notoriously close to Putin, and both run notoriously corrupt administrations, but inferring anything from that or from what comes out of their meetings is IMO speculative. – Denis de Bernardy Aug 17 '17 at 17:43

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