The transaction comes in token of the Transneft coming back to the transnational syndicated credit market three and a half years after its maiden loan, which the company made in September 2001, points out the release.
The money will go to fund BTS third stage laying, and re-finance a part of corporate indebtedness.
The three-year loan is to be paid in three equal installments after a two-year preferential term expires.
The Transneft is the world's largest petroleum piping company. It transports 94 per cent of Russian-extracted oil, with a pipeline network of 48,228 kilometers.
The federal government accepted, toward last December's end, a proposal by the Industry and Energy Ministry and the Transneft to extend the BTS throughput to an annual 60 million tons. The Russian government also deemed it expedient for the company to fund BTS third stage laying with borrowed money.
The Cabinet determined to lay a united Baltic Pipeline Net, Octiber 16, 1997. The chief BTS mission is to pipe petroleum to Northern Europe from oilfields of the Timan-Pechora oil-and-gas-bearing province, West Siberia, the Urals and the Volga country via a new terminal in the Gulf of Finland. The BTS may eventually serve to export oil from other CIS countries, mainly Kazakhstan.
BTS blueprints envisage two mainlines laid-one from Kharyaga, township in the Nentsi autonomous area, Arkhangelsk Region, to Usinsk, town in the Komi Republic, European Russia's north. The other line is to stretch from Kirishi in the Leningrad Region to the Primorsk tanker terminal on the northeast coast of the Gulf of Finland, 150 kilometers off St. Petersburg. The project also envisages updating certain stretches of three available mainlines-Usinsk-Ukhta, Ukhta-Yaroslavl, and Yaroslavl-Kirishi. Their total length is currently 1,885 km, to be prolonged by another 833 km. The Baltic mainline net will thus be 2,718 km long.
The project is estimated at two billion US dollars.
