Belgian utility Electrabel and German power giant RWE have been shortlisted to help finance and operate a new nuclear power plant in northern Bulgaria, the state-owned National Electricity Company said Tuesday.
NEC said in a statement it had whittled down to just two an original shortlist of six companies interested in acquiring a minority stake in Belene Power Company, which will finance and run the 4.0-billion-euro (6.1-billion-dollar) plant.
Italian energy group Enel, French giant Electricite de France, Germany power company E.ON and CEZ of the Czech Republic had initially been in the running as well.
NEC said that Electrabel and RWE had presented "the best offers" and negotiations would now continue with both to pick the winning bid.
In January, Bulgaria signed a contract with Russian company Atomstroyexport to actually build the long-stalled 2,000-megawatt nuclear facility.
Construction work on the first of the plant's two reactors is scheduled to begin in the middle of this year, with the first reactor expected to be operational by January 2014 and the second a year later.
The Belene project, launched in 1987, was halted a couple of years later following pressure from environmentalists.
But Bulgaria renewed plans to build the facility in 2005 to compensate for an expected downturn in its energy exports after the closure in late 2006 of four out of six operational reactors at its single nuclear power plant at Kozloduy.
The country used to be one of the Balkans' main exporters of energy, supplying some 7.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity abroad in 2006, but it agreed to close the reactors ahead of its entry into the European Union on January 1, 2007.
