The ambitious project to lay a pipeline under the Baltic Sea to pump Russian natural gas to Germany bypassing the Baltic States and Poland is currently being developed by Russia's state-controlled gas giant Gazprom and Germany's E.ON and BASF at an estimated cost of $12 billion.
"I am not ruling out a situation where the three interested parties will discuss this or that version for the pipeline" he said at a news conference after his meeting with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "I mean the Russian side as well."
The first of Nord Stream's two parallel pipelines, approximately 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) long, each with a transport capacity of some 27.5 billion cubic meters per year, is due to become operational in 2010. In the second phase, capacity should double to about 55 billion cubic meters per year.
