Bulgarian state gas company Bulgargaz EAD has been notified that Azerbaijan has suspended contracted gas supply to Bulgaria from January 7 until January 11 because of unspecified technical reasons.
Replacement gas volumes have been sourced from Turkey's Botas, Bulgargaz said.
"Thus, the outage did not result in additional costs for the company to purchase replacement natural gas and did not affect the natural gas market in the region," it said in Thursday's statement, adding that the situation has made more case for diversification of sources of natural gas.
An industry source told Reuters that supplies were interrupted because of "an issue" at BP's Alpha platform at the Shah Deniz gas field.
BP Azerbaijan said on Friday that it had suspended the work of the Shah Deniz Alfa (SDA) platform after detecting a technical issue at the subsea gas condensate export line between the platform and the Sangachal terminal.
"All people on the platform are safe and there is no environmental impact. All offshore facilities including the SDA platform and the pipeline are also safe," BP said in a statement.
"For operational reasons, production and export operations from the SDA platform were suspended and the platform has been safely shut down ... We are currently working to resolve the problem and resume normal operations as quickly as possible," a spokeswoman told Reuters.
Bulgaria stopped receiving Russian gas in April 2022 after it refused to pay for supply via a scheme involving rouble payments stipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The European Union and NATO member, which needs about three billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas per year, now receives more than 1 bcm from Azerbaijan while buying the rest elsewhere. (Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Nailia Bagirova Editing by David Goodman)