The Visegrad Group — the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary — agreed with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, as well as leaders of Romania and Bulgaria, on Feb. 3 to start the so-called European North-South Gas Corridor, a project to connect Central European natural gas infrastructure. The corridor will begin exclusively with natural gas but will ultimately be expanded to oil and electricity links between countries abutting the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The issue of financing new infrastructural projects was also the theme of the EU Energy Summit on Feb. 4, where the heads of government of the Visegrad Group plus Romania and Bulgaria were in attendance. The European Union has decided to give the EU energy commissioner until June to come up with ideas on how to finance the various energy infrastructure projects. Despite a lot of backslapping at both events, there is still a lack of concrete details from the bloc on how it intends to raise private funding or contribute public funding at a time when many EU states, particularly the United Kingdom, are calling for cuts in the EU budget.
