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Russian Oil Major Ready to Fund Pipeline Construction Across Black Sea

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 September 2005, 12:00 CDT

Text of report by Russian news agency RIA

Tuapse, Krasnodar Territory, 6 September: Rosneft is ready to finance the building of the Burgas-Alexandropoulos oil pipeline without involving any other investors, the company president, Sergey Bogdanchikov, has told President Putin during the latter's visit to the transhipment oil terminal in Tuapse, adding that the project is expected to be implemented within the next seven to 10 years. "The estimated cost of building 280 km of the oil pipeline is 700m-800m dollars," he said. "Although the project envisaged integrated financing, in principle we are ready to fund the project ourselves."

The Rosneft president made it clear that the implementation of the project will help tackle "the problem of Bosphorus capacity". "At present 86m tonnes of oil are pumped across the Bosphorus whereas there is a demand for 100m [timeframe not stated]," he added.

Bogdanchikov recalled that Rosneft owns 7 per cent in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. According to him the company achieved its 3m tonne oil quota thanks to 2m tonnes of Chechen oil and 1m tonnes of oil from Western Siberia.

Speaking about the Kurmangazy project in the Caspian, Bogdanchikov stressed that Russian experts estimate real reserves of oil at the deposit to be 1bn and not 2bn tonnes. "Together with Kazakh partners we believe that we will be able to recover about 50m tonnes of oil there a year," he said.

[ITAR-TASS at 1321 gmt quoted Putin as saying that the price difference of over four dollar between Urals and Brent brands of oil was "unfair".]

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

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