Russia’s Pacific Oil Pipeline Still Up in the Air

Russia’s plan to build an oil pipeline to the Pacific, equivalent to adding another Libya to the world oil market, risks foundering over money, politics, the environment and the question of where the oil will come from.

The $11.5-billion plan, first mooted four years ago by Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft, promises Russia its biggest economic fillip since a financial meltdown in 1998.

At 4,130-km (2,566 miles), almost as long as Chile, the pipeline will pump 80 million tonnes of oil a year (1.6 million barrels per day) to the Pacific, where growing Chinese demand is gobbling up more and more of the oil shipped to the region.

“This project will allow our oil supplies to significantly change the geo-political situation,” Transneft’s chairman Semyon Vainshtok told a Moscow conference this week.
Reuters