The Italian, Greek and Albanian governments have agreed to provide political support to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline project to deliver Caspian natural gas to the European Union.

A memorandum of understanding was signed late on Thursday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, TAP said in an e-mailed statement.

The EU is seeking a link to the Caspian to cut dependence on gas supplies from Russia, which provides a quarter of the region’s demand.

By May, the BP Plc-led companies developing the Shah Deniz gas project in Azerbaijan’s part of the Caspian Sea plan to choose between the Trans Adriatic, or TAP, project and Nabucco West, led by OMV AG.

TAP is being developed by Norway’s Statoil ASA, Switzerland’s EGL AG and Germany’s E.ON Ruhrgas AG and plans to transport as much as 20 billion cubic meters of gas a year from the Turkish border to southern Italy through Greece and Albania and across the Adriatic Sea.

[Bloomberg]