Assuming good conditions, Transneft plans to have the capacity of the Baltic Pipeline System up to 50 million tonnes by the end of 2004, Transneft Vice President Sergei Grigoriev has told at the press conference. The system's transshipping capacity is expected to reach 42 million tonnes by next spring, he said.

Only last week, Valery Serdyukov, the governor of Leningrad Region, declared that pipeline capacity would reach 62 million tonnes by the end of 2004. Grigoriev explained that Serdyukov's figure is unrealistic until the port at Primorsk has greater capacity. 'We may build a second terminal adjacent to the one there now,' he noted. A plan to upgrade system capacity to 62 million tonnes is currently in development and would cost more than USD 1 billion, preliminary figures indicate, he said.

The pipeline and port complex, with a capacity of 12 million tonnes of oil a year, started operation in December 2001. Its capacity reached 30 million tonnes in November 2003 (a new pipeline, parallel to the old one, was built from Palkino, in Yaroslavsk Region, to Primorsk along with a new pumping station, Palkino-2). The 42 million tonne capacity will be made possible by reconstruction of the Bykovo and Kirishi oil pumping stations, he said.

The Baltic system uses oil from the Timano-Pechorsk oil region, Western Siberia, the Ural-Volga oil region and Kazakhstan.

News source: www.rosbaltnews.com
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