In the first stages, a pipeline will be laid from Taishet, the biggest station on the Baikal-Amur railway, to the village of Skovorodino. Then, exported oil will be transported in rail tanks to the Perevoznaya Bay terminal in the port of Nakhodka. Feasibility studies for the project should be ready by about the middle of the next year. Then they will be vetted by state inter-departmental experts.
The pipeline will pass 150 kilometers north of Lake Baikal, mainly along the well-developed zone of the operating BAM railway. From Skovorodino, which is the nearest station on the route to China, it will be possible to build in the future a feeder towards the border.
The time to construct the route to Skovorodino has been determined by the government at 3.5 years. The cost of the Taishet-Skovorodino section was earlier estimated at $6.5 billion. Structures to be built here will include a filling trestle for rail tank cars. And until the entire line is completed, oil will be delivered to the Pacific by rail. Which will require laying second and even third tracks on BAM. Russian Railways has already agreed with Transneft the main aspects of future cooperation in the transportation of export oil.
The overall length of the Eastern Siberian oil pipeline (Taishet-Kazachinskoye-Skovorodino-Khabarovsk-Nakhodka) is 4,130 kilometers. It will be provided with 44 oil pumping stations, 14 tank farms with a capacity of up to 4.4 million tons, a terminal, and berths and coast facilities in Perevoznaya Bay. It is proposed that the route should be single-stringed. The tube diameter will be 1,220 mm. The construction will involve something like 30,000 workers. They are to construct 48 crossovers on rivers, including such big ones as the Lena, Upper Angara, Ilim, Chuma and others. It will be necessary to build 115 crossings over motor and rail roads.
With construction completed, the pumping capacity of the pipeline must be 80 million tons. The total cost of the pipeline will be almost $11-12 billion. To run it, Tatneft is setting up a subsidiary which will include 4 structural departments (Taishet, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk and Nakhodka).
As a resource base in the first stages the government selected the deposits in the Tomsk region, the Khanty-Mansi autonomous area in Western Siberia each with 24 million tons a year and later, following additional exploration and commissioning, the Leno-Tungusskaya, Khatanga-Vilyui oil and gas plantations in Eastern Siberia and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). As post-exploration advances the resource base of the pipeline route may include the Yurubchenko-Takhomskoye, Talakan, Chayandinsk, and Kovykta fields (Yakutia and Krasnoyarsk Territory).
The aggregate oil reserves of Eastern Siberia, Yakutia and the Far East - according to existing estimates - exceed 19 billion tons, of which 10 billion tons is accounted for by the Eastern Siberian deposits. This region is now producing less than 1 million tons a year. By 2010, oil output will reach 5-10 million tons, and 55 to 60 million tons not earlier than 2020. Alexander Safronov, director of the Yakutsk Institute of Oil and Gas, believes that the substantive part of this increase may be "eaten up" by domestic consumption in the region, which is to grow from 15 million tons in 2003 to 35-40 million tons in 2030.
The geological prospecting and detailed post-exploration of the already discovered fields, as estimated by the Institute of Oil and Gas Geology of the Siberian department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, will call for investments in the next few years totaling $14 billion. This is only 2% to 3% ofthe costs of oil sales. Large world oil companies spend up to 10% on geological exploration.
The Oriental Express is gathering speed towards the Pacific. And only the future will show what is more in this project - pragmatism and economic sense, or political ambitions.
