MOSCOW, May 24 (RIA Novosti) - Sberbank has approved a credit line of 65 billion rubles ($2.4 billion) for Transneft to build a $11.5-billion pipeline from East Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, a bank news release said Wednesday.
Russia's state-controlled savings bank said it had provided the six-year loan to the state pipeline monopoly, because the project met Russia's strategic economic interests.
"The loan will finance the first stage of the East Siberia - Pacific pipeline project," the news release said.
The bank said the pipeline project was both economically efficient and important for the country's economy.
"Sberbank assigns priority to the funding of large-scale projects implemented by Russian companies," the statement said.
On Tuesday, Mikhail Chemakin, the head of Vostoknefteprovod, a company involved in construction of the East Siberia - Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline, said the first three kilometers of the pipeline had already been laid, and that the project would be finished by December 2008.
The pipeline is slated to pump up to 80 million metric tons of crude a year (1.6 mln bbl/d) from Siberia to Russia's Far East, which will then be exported to the Asia-Pacific region, in particular energy-hungry China.
The first stage of the project will connect Taishet in the Irkutsk Region to Skovorodino in the Amur Region in the Far East.
Initially, the cost of the first stage was estimated at $6.5 billion. However, the estimate is being revised after President Putin ordered to reroute the pipeline 40 kilometers (25 miles) away from Lake Baikal, the world's largest fresh water body and a Unesco World Heritage Site, following fervent protests from residents, the local administration, and environmentalists. Under the original project, the pipeline would have run 800 meters (2,600 feet) away from the lake. The new feasibility study will be ready by the end of the year, Transneft said.
The destination point of the pipeline on the Pacific is to be selected in the fall of 2006. Earlier, it had been Perevoznaya Bay in the Far Eastern Primorye Territory.
