Russia’s Putin Confirms Siberian Oil Pipeline to Go to China First
President Vladimir Putin has confirmed that a multibillion-dollar oil pipeline to be built across Siberia will first go to China and only later to the Pacific coast, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, Sept. 7, in its online edition.

As MosNews reported on several occasions, Japan and China have been vying over the route of the pipeline, which will eventually pump as many as one million barrels of Siberian oil a day to East Asia. When the decision on the pipeline was made in December 2004, Russian authorities said that the main pipeline will go to the Pacific Ocean port of Nakhodka from where oil would be shipped to Japan and Southeast Asian countries. A branch pipeline going to the Chinese border would be built as well, the authorities said, but so far, Russia has refused to commit on which customer would get deliveries when.

But in a meeting with Western analysts and journalists which took place in the Kremlin late on Monday, Sept. 6, Putin said shipments initially will go to China’s oil center in Daqing, the U.S. paper cited one of the participants of the meeting. “The Daqing pipeline will be built first,” Putin was reported as telling the group. “But we will also build to Nakhodka.”

Putin said that by sending oil to Daqing, Russia will be able to diversify export routes and avoid becoming dependent on a single customer for its oil. “We want to sell to the whole Asia-Pacific region,” he said.

Construction of the pipeline is to begin late this year, with the first stage of the line carrying 30 million metric tons of crude annually from Taishet in Siberia to Skovorodino near the Chinese border. From there, a pipeline is expected to take two-thirds of the oil south to Daqing, while the remaining 10 million metric tons would be shipped by rail to a new port to be built on the Pacific coast near Nakhodka. The project is expected to be completed around 2008.

Putin also has pledged to expand the line to 50 million metric tons a year, or roughly 1.2 million barrels a day, and to extend the pipe all the way to the Pacific coast at some time in the future, the Wall Street Journal report said.

Putin also reiterated that Russia will continue to expand oil production amid global worries about petroleum supplies. He played down the slowdown in output growth over the past year, noting that, despite problems at embattled giant Yukos, Russian production has been rising.

“Even without Yukos, oil production has increased and will continue to increase,” Putin was quoted as saying.