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Construction starts on Siberia-Asia oil pipeline
AFP
MOSCOW
Petroleumworld.com 04 28 06
Construction started Friday on a major pipeline to ship oil from Russian fields in Siberia to markets in Asia, the state pipeline company Transneft said.
"The work has begun," Marina Bondareva, head of a Transneft department supervising the construction, told AFP from the central Siberian city of Taishet where the initial construction was taking place.
"Welding of the first two sections of pipe began several minutes ago," she said, adding that more than 140 workers were on the site and involved in the start of construction.
Workers had already laid out 67 kilometers (42 miles) of pipe sections ready for welding, Bondareva said.
The pipeline is central to Russia's strategy of building new energy transport routes to supply increasingly hungry markets in China, Japan and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.
China and Japan have in particular lobbied fiercely behind the scenes in recent years to be chosen as the main market to be served by the pipeline.
Present plans call for the pipeline to terminate near the Russian far eastern port of Nakhodka, facing Japan. Russian officials however have signalled that a branch leading directly to the Chinese oil capital of Daqing is also foreseen.
Although work on construction of the pipeline began on Friday, previous scheduling uncertainties meant that an official ceremony to launch the project was due to be held sometime in the next three weeks, said Bondareva.
The launch of the project came two days after President Vladimir Putin intervened personally and ordered that the pipeline be re-routed away from Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake, handing a victory to environmentalists who had protested the original route.
The region around Lake Baikal is prone to earthquakes. Fears of a quake rupturing the future pipeline and creating a massive spill in the biggest and deepest freshwater lake in the world triggered a grassroots backlash against Transneft.
AFP 28 04 06 0822 GMT
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