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The pipeline is expected to deliver natural gas to Serbia, Hungary and Austria.
Bulgaria's state gas operator Bulgartransgaz has signed a EUR 1.1 billion (US$1.2 billion) contract with the consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Arkad Engineering to build a TurkStream pipeline extension to supply natural gas from Russia to parts of Europe bypassing Ukraine.
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The contract envisages laying a 474-kilometer (296-mile) pipeline that would extend from Bulgaria's southern border with Turkey to its western border with Serbia, the Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda wrote on September 18, referring to the Associated Press (AP).
The pipeline is expected to deliver gas to Serbia, Hungary and Austria as an offshoot of Gazprom's TurkStream pipeline.
Bulgaria is heavily dependent on Russian gas. Partners in the West have repeatedly urged the country to diversify its energy sources, the AP said.
The country was among those hit hardest when the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine stopped in 2006 and 2009 as a result of Russia's gas blackmail.
Now Russia continues to implement the Nord Stream 2 gas project, which involves the construction of two strings of a gas pipeline with a total capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year from the Russian coast via the Baltic Sea to Germany.
The construction of the pipeline was planned to be completed before the end of 2019. But it may be delayed for eight months over permits from Denmark, which will increase the costs of the project by EUR 660 million.