MOSCOW, March 10 (RIA Novosti) - State-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft has begun exploratory work for a new pipeline to link oil-rich parts of Siberia to northwestern Russia, the company said Friday.

Exploration is being conducted near the town of Indiga in the northwestern Arkhangelsk Region, where a terminal and a crude storage will be built.

The pipeline's capacity is estimated at about 241 barrels per day, and will be over 290 miles long. A feasibility study will be completed in late 2006.

Shareholders approved investment in the construction of the pipeline, from Haryaga in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area in Siberia, at 850.8 million rubles (about $30.4 million) at their annual meeting in November 2005.

Originally the Haryaga-Indiga pipeline was seen as the first phase of a larger Western Siberia-Murmansk oil pipeline to pump oil from Western Siberia to Murmansk, a permanently ice-free port on the Barents Sea, for trans-shipment to Europe and the United States. Later, however, Transneft decided that it would be a separate pipeline.

Russia's energy ministry, Transneft, and the country's leading oil companies Yukos, LUKoil, TNK, and Sibneft met in June 2003 and ordered a feasibility study on the project to deliver oil to Murmansk. The pipeline's initial capacity is projected at over a million barrels per day, and could be increased to more than two million in the future.

Newspapers have said that Transneft, which will run another pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Far East, the ambitious project to supply oil to Japan and energy-hungry China, had delayed the construction of the Haryaga-Indiga pipeline, citing the lack of guarantees from oil producers on required pumping volumes.