E.ON Still in talks with Russia's Gazprom

E.ON, Germany's leading power supplier, is continuing to negotiate with Russian gas giant Gazprom on possible cooperation in Russia, even though it was recently pipped at the post for two major projects by chemicals giant BASF, E.ON's chief said Wednesday. "We will continue to negotiate with Gazprom" on "the participation in a gas field, as well as a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, and joint projects in electricity," E.ON chairman Wulf Bernotat told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in an interview. "We're in talks, but we have time," he said. E.ON suffered a setback at the beginning of this month when Gazprom and BASF signed two major contracts on the production, transport and marketing of Russian gas to Germany. The first contract, signed by BASF's oil and gas unit Wintershall and Gazprom, concerned the development of the key Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in western Siberia. The second contract was an agreement to take a stake in the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP), the company in charge of a big project to build a Baltic gas pipeline.