Victor Kolesnik, executive director of a local contractor under the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) project, said the 144km-section (90 miles) would run from the town of Babayevo in the Vologda Region, north of Moscow, to the town of Tikhvin in the Leningrad Region, which surrounds St. Petersburg.
Construction under the 4.7-billion euro project, which is managed by Russian energy giant Gazprom, began last year. The pipeline, which is to include two parallel legs measuring 750 miles each, will connect the Baltic seashore near the Russian city of Vyborg with the Greifswald region on the German coast.
The first leg of the pipeline is expected to have an estimated capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters, and the second will double the NEGP capacity to 55 billion cu m annually.
The first leg is set to come on-stream in 2010. Offshoots may then be built to link it with Russia's Baltic exclave, Kaliningrad, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Britain.
The pipeline will pump gas from the giant Shtokman gas condensate deposit, a Barents Sea shelf in Russia's north, with estimated reserves of 3.2 trillion cu m of natural gas and 31 million metric tons of gas condensate, and possibly from other huge gas deposits in the north of Russia.
Under the agreement to build the North European Gas Pipeline signed by Gazprom and Germany's BASF AG and E.ON September 8, the parties intend to set up a Russian-German joint venture in which a 51% stake will belong to Gazprom, while BASF and E.ON will each hold stakes of 24.5%.
