BRAZI, Romania, June 3 (Reuters) - Austria's OMV, the leading shareholder in the Nabucco gas pipeline, is confident Romania remains committed to the European union-backed project, its chief executive said on Wednesday. In Romania to launch the construction of a power plant by local refiner Petrom, OMV Chief Executive Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer also said he hoped an agreement on the 7.9-billion-euro project would be reached this summer, as expected.
Romania said in May it would consider other projects if Nabucco talks did not push forward, leaving the door open to join a rival Russian project, South Stream, which Austria is also considering.
"(I am) not at all concerned that Romania will withdraw from the (Nabucco) project if it is successful," Ruttenstorfer told reporters in the southern Romanian town of Brazi. "This is the condition, but I am quite optimistic regarding that. Time has never been better for Nabucco than it is now."
Nabucco negotiations have heated up in recent weeks with Turkey demanding to use 15 percent of gas pumped through the pipeline, which is meant to relieve Europe's reliance on Russian natural gas supplies.
The Nabucco consortium wants to build the pipeline by 2014 but has trouble securing supplies. It is eyeing an Iraqi Kurdistan plan to export gas from the autonomous region through the pipeline, although the central government has rejected the scheme.
Ruttenstorfer said the fact that the region had started this week oil exports from two fields it had developed with foreign oil firms -- although the Baghdad government has called the contracts illegal -- was a good sign.
"For Iraq Kurdistan, for Turkey, all the Nabucco countries, I think this was a very important date," he said.
Speaking about OMV's result forecasts, Ruttenstorfer said that 2009 would be "a challenging year".
In May, the oil and gas company reported a steep from in underlying operating earnings in the first quarter and said it expected earnings to fall this year amid high volatility in all market factors. (Reporting by Ioana Patran, writing by Justyna Pawlak; editing by Simon Jessop)