Italy"s Eni SpA, which is Gazprom"s partner...

Vedomosti quoted Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni as saying at a Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference in Houston on Wednesday that if all the partners decided to merge the two pipelines for part of the route, "we would reduce investments, operational costs and increase overall returns."

Both South Stream and Nabucco aim to supply natural gas to Southern and Central Europe. The South Stream project is designed to deliver up to 63 billion cubic meters of Central Asian and Russian natural gas under the Black Sea while Nabucco is intended to pump 31 billion cu m of natural gas from the Caspian region via Turkey, the paper said.

Russian experts, however, are skeptical about the prospects of merging the two pipelines as Nabucco was originally designed to cut Europe"s dependence on Russian natural gas deliveries, the paper said.

"Russia will hardly agree to such a merger as Nabucco is lobbied not only by the EU but also by the U.S.," the paper quoted Dosym Satpayev,

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