Bulgaria and Romania have opened a new, 25-km bi-directional natural gas pipeline running under the Danube River. This will allow Bulgaria to import gas from Europe and accordingly reduce its dependency on Russia for its energy supplies, as ptj reported earlier.

"We can achieve a lot with our friends and neighbours from Romania... they are starting operations from today," Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov told an opening ceremony at the Danube river town of Marten.

The pipeline has a maximum capacity of 1.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas per year from Bulgaria to Romania while the capacity going the other way is 500 million cubic metres per year.

The two Balkan neighbours have stepped up efforts to link their gas networks with those of other countries after Moscow scrapped its planned South Stream pipeline project in 2014.