Pipeliners

28.02.2007 - MosNews - Japan has offered to share the costs with Russia for extending a Siberian oil and gas pipeline to the Pacific coast, apparently to help more output to be routed to Japan rather than China, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, Feb. 27, citing Japanese Finance Minister Koji Omi. MosNews has reported numerous times since 2004 on the project for Japan and China bound oil pipeline. After much consideration Russia has decided to run the proposed 4,300-kilometer oil pipeline close to its border with China, with a branch to the Pacific Ocean port at Perevoznaya Bay to be built later. This has raised fears in Japan that the branch to the Pacific will not be built as quickly as planned. To prevent this from happening, Japan is now ready to pitch in the construction. Japan currently gets over 80 percent of its oil supplies from the Middle East, but would like to diversify its supplies and decrease dependence on the Arabic countries. In turning to Russia for its oil and gas deliveries it is doing the opposite of what the European leaders call for. As MosNews also reported, Europe, which currently depends on Russia for about 1/3 of its gas and oil, wants to decrease its dependence on the bit eastern neighbor for fear that Russia may use energy resources to meet its political goals. Japanese minister also urged a visiting Russian delegation that included Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to supply energy from a major project in the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin that was recently taken over by Russia’s state-controlled natural-gas monopoly Gazprom.