On January 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin said
that construction of the first stage of the Tayshet-Nakhodka oil
pipeline will start this summer, and a branch line from the main
pipeline to China's Daqing will be put into use first.
The first-stage pipeline, from Tayshet in central Siberia to
Skovorodino 60 kilometers north of the border with northeast China,
will be operational by November 8, 2008, with an annual oil
transmission capacity of 30 million tons. Cost of construction is
estimated at around US$6.5 billion.
China and Russia have had 12 years of marathon talks discussing
the pipeline, according to a Beijing Morning Post report
yesterday.
Originally, both sides agreed to bring oil from Angarsk in east
Siberia to Daqing, with one-third of the pipeline to be built
within the Chinese territory.
But plans changed when Japan stepped into the equation. At the
end of 2002, Russia reportedly gave up the Angarsk-Daqing route,
and decided to construct a new line from Angarsk to the port city
of Nakhodka in the Sea of Japan.
While Sino-Russian negotiations reached an impasse, China made a
breakthrough with its western neighbor Kazakhstan. A transnational
oil project between them links Atasu in Kazakhstan to Alataw Pass
in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The first phase of the 960 km pipeline, which joins the Alataw
Pass-Dushanzi pipeline in northwestern Xinjiang, was completed last
month with a designed annual oil transmission capacity of 10
million tons. Its second phase is expected to be finished in 2010,
creating a delivery capacity of 20 million tons.
Seeing China gradually turning its attention to Central Asia,
Russian oil companies who didn't want to lose the huge Chinese
market had the jitters. In February 2003, then Russian Minister of
Energy Igor Yusufov introduced a compromise solution to combine the
two pipelines into one, while giving priority to the construction
of a branch line to Daqing. This provided the embryonic form of the
current Tayshet-Nakhodka route.
In September 2005, Putin said that economically speaking,
building the China pipeline first was a more attractive option. By
exporting oil to Daqing and then to the whole Asian-Pacific region,
Russia could avoid relying too heavily on only a few customers.
Meanwhile, China also energetically promoted the oil project
with Russia. Premier Wen
Jiabao and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Yefimovich Fradkov
signed a communiqué at their 10th regular meeting in Beijing in
November. The communiqué said the two countries believe that energy
cooperation is "significantly important," and are supportive to
Chinese and Russian companies for their work to lay out and build
an oil pipeline from Russia to China.
The Russian government gave the green light to the 4,130 km
Tayshet-Nakhodka pipeline project in December 2004. The total
construction cost is estimated at between US$11.0 billion and
US$16.2 billion. The annual capacity of the pipeline is likely to
be 80 million tons.
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, January 12, 2006)