Russia's Gazprom to build pipeline through North Korea
Another Russian pipeline to Asia, announced by billionaire and major Gazprom contractor Gennady Timchenko in May, will pass through North Korea.
Gazprom, which is already engaged in the construction of gas pipelines to Turkey, the EU and China with a total cost of $25 billion, is negotiating a new construction project with South Korea, Gazprom deputy chairman Vitaly Markelov announced on Friday.
The project in question was mentioned in a memorandum with the South Korean company Cogas in 2008, and has been discussed seriously since 2011. It proposes to construct an 800 km line from the endpoint of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas transit system to South Korea, passing through North Korea.
It was estimated that by 2015, the pipe would already be transporting 7.5 million tons of gas per year, but negotiations came to a halt due to the deterioration of the situation surrounding North Korea’s nuclear program.
“Today the political situation is somewhat different,” Markelov said on Friday.
“We are still unable to proceed, but we are renewing negotiations with Korea. A series of negotiations for this part have taken place, and these negotiations are still underway,” he remarked.
In the project, North Korea will probably be both a transporter and a buyer of Russian gas, which will help the country cut off by sanctions to return to full-fledged development, observed Sergey Pikin, director of the Energy Development Fund. According to him, Gazprom does not want to be “confined solely to China”, to where it is building the Power of Siberia pipeline with a claimed capacity of 38 billion cubic meters per year.
Beijing has agreed to double its gas purchase volumes, whereas the US has refused to make any new gas contracts with Russia.