Prague - The European Union will ask Turkey and energy exporters such as Egypt and Iraq to sign up to a new treaty on oil and gas transit at a summit in Prague on Friday, according to a draft declaration seen by the German Press Agency dpa.

The bloc will also ask energy producers to set aside specific volumes of oil and gas for its use, as the EU bids to guarantee energy supplies in an increasingly competitive world.

The EU and key energy producers and transit countries want to see "the establishment of a Corridor Agreement" setting out the rules on how energy supplies should be transported, how much transit countries should charge and how the fees should be shared out, says the draft, which EU diplomats debated on Wednesday.

Such an agreement would bind the EU and Azerbaijan, Egypt, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - the countries of the EU's so-called "Southern Corridor" - in a single contract on energy transport for the first time.

According to the draft declaration, future cooperation between the summit's participants should also include "the identification of non- committed natural gas and oil volumes by producer countries that can be dedicated specifically to the EU."

Energy producers should provide "a precise timetable for their availability on the basis of their commercial profitability."

In return, the EU should give "reliable commitments" on the amount of fuel it will buy, to ensure "transparency, competitiveness, long term predictability and stable regulatory conditions."

The EU is keen to reduce its dependency on Russian gas, which currently accounts for a quarter of all the gas burned in the bloc.(dpa)