은 사실인 것으로 확인 되고 있습니다.
현재 언론을 움직이자는 글이 올라오고 있고, 한국에서도 이와 관련한 활동을 해달라는 요청이 오고 있습니다. 우선 자료를 한글로 번역하는 작업부터 시작을 해야 할 것 같습니다.
(BBC와 뉴욕 타임즈에 보도되었습니다. 그리고 러시아에서 활동하는 NGO를 통해서도 사실 확인이 되었습니다.)
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Disputes at Every Turn of Siberia Pipeline
January 21, 2005 By JAMES BROOKE
PEREVOZNAYA, Russia – Stretching from Lake Baikal to the Sea of Japan, the first trans-Siberian oil pipeline is to run 2,565 miles – more than three times the length of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. With a price tag of $15.5 billion, it looms as modern Russia’s biggest infrastructure investment, President Vladimir V. Putin’s answer to the Trans-Siberian Railway of the czars.
Because China and Japan both rely on the Middle East for about 85 percent of their oil imports, both economic giants competed fiercely over what could be the world’s longest and most expensive oil pipeline. Trumping China with a more generous financing offer, Japan, the world’s second-largest oil importer, hopes that the four-foot diameter pipe will bind it to Russia, the world’s second-largest oil exporter.
It may be a decade before the pipeline is completed. But the line would increase by about a third Russia’s capacity to export oil by pipeline and would be a major Russian shift toward the Pacific, where oil could be sold to any country, including the United States.
But the project still faces major hurdles. There are no guarantees there will be enough oil to fill the pipe, although Russia has as much as 67 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves along the pipeline route. When the oil reaches the Sea of Japan, there are no public commitments binding Russia to sell it to Japan, whose ports are only a day’s sail away. And Russia’s last-minute switch of the Pacific terminal site from an existing oil port to this pristine bay is already putting Japanese banks in the middle of a growing global environmental protest movement.
Contrary to the traditionally opaque nature of many major Russian investments, the pipeline is expected to come under rigorous international scrutiny. The Kremlin has vowed not to contribute government funds for the pipeline construction. Instead, Transneft, the government pipeline monopoly, has been told to go find its own financing, preferably on international markets.
Foreign banks, especially the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, will increasingly face questions over the pipeline’s future profitability and over Moscow’s little-publicized decision in December to switch the pipeline terminus from Vostochny, Russia’s main industrial port in the Pacific, to Perevoznaya, a tranquil bay.
In the summer, the bay’s sandy beaches and warm waters are frequented by ferry loads of beachgoers from Vladivostok, 10 miles to the east. In the winter, this frozen semiwilderness is home to some of the last 30 to 40 Amur leopards in the world. The Amur is one of 50 endangered species found only in this corner of Pacific Russia.
To get to the terminal and planned oil refinery, dozens of tankers would steam daily past Russia’s only maritime nature reserve, a collection of 11 islands prized for 3,000 species, a rare wealth of biodiversity that comes from a meeting of boreal and subtropical water currents. Navigating a five-mile-wide channel littered with more small islands, the tankers would then enter a maritime cul-de-sac with such shallow waters and fragile ecology that environmentalists have started calling Perevoznaya Bay “Siberia’s Prince William Sound,” evoking memories of the 1989 oil spill in Alaska by the oil tanker Exxon Valdez.
“We are already seeing the start of an environmental campaign on this issue, which is really going to grow in coming months,” said David Gordon, executive director of Pacific Watch, an environmental group based in California. “The pipeline will be a test case of whether or not Russia can meet the top-level environmental standards that the public expects from oil and gas projects around the world.”
This winter, American and European environmentalists are organizing a campaign to persuade Moscow to build the pipeline terminal in Vostochny, a modern industrial port and railhead built 30 years ago next to Nakhodka. Adding urgency, May 1 is the new deadline for Transneft to devise a pipeline construction timetable and for the ministries of transport and defense to establish oil tanker shipping routes to Perevoznaya Bay.
Last fall, Russian environmentalists began collecting signatures on petitions and writing letters of protest to President Putin and to Transneft, which plans to get the oil here by building the pipeline through one nature preserve and along the southern border of a second preserve.
“If the pipeline is to be built in this area, a tremendous part of the tiny leopard and tiger habitat will be cut off,” Dimitri G. Pikunov, a Russian biologist, said one recent afternoon as he drove through Barsovy Wildlife Refuge, which would be bisected by the pipeline. Noting that the Siberian tiger has other strongholds in the maritime region, he added: “If a port is built near this reserve, no animals will stay. And this area represents the leopard’s last stand.”
Anatoly Lebedev, a Vladivostok environmentalist leading the opposition campaign, said: “It is obviously a crazy idea to kill all the recreational industry in the district, which offers generally cheap and accessible recreation on the sea coast for millions of Far Easterners and Siberians.”
Anton Semenov, another environmentalist in Vladivostok, said he was worried that the bay’s “strong currents would carry oil from any spills far and wide.”
The oil terminal project also presents a test between Japan’s energy anxieties and its environmental concerns. Representatives of Japan’s development bank have participated closely in negotiating possible financing for the project.
Conceivably, this Japanese bank could finance up to 80 percent of the project, which would make it the largest loan in the bank’s history. From an original price tag of $6 billion, costs have ballooned over the last two years, inflated by rising steel prices and the technical challenge of building across soils affected by differing conditions of permafrost.
Although Japanese studies say there will be enough oil found near the pipeline route to fill the pipeline, skeptics say the line could be a 21st-century Trans-Siberian Railway – a wonderful exercise in nation building that has never made a profit.
Initially, the pipeline was to be far shorter, going to Skovorodino, a Siberian town 37 miles north of the Chinese border, and then angling south into northern China. A later version, had the pipeline forking at Skovorodino, with one third of the oil going to China, and two thirds going to Vostochny, and the open market.
But Japan overpowered China in the bidding, although, to appease China, Russia has promised to increase its annual oil shipments to China by rail to 300,000 barrels a day next year.
China is the world’s fastest-rising major oil consumer. By 2020, China’s oil imports are to be double the 2004 level. By 2030, China may have more cars than the United States. But China would not match Japan’s financing power, and Russia feared falling captive to one buyer.
Moving aggressively, Japan offered $7 billion in soft loans for construction of the line and billions more to help Japanese oil companies find and develop oil in Eastern Siberia. Tokyo lobbied heavily to get the entire pipeline to the Sea of Japan – 1.6 million barrels a day. Although oil supply guarantees have not been worked out, Japan, with its seaports only 275 miles to the southeast of Vladivostok, is expected to be the primary buyer. But much of the oil is expected to go on the open market, available for shipment to South Korea, China or even the United States.
“The Nakhodka route is undoubtedly a win-win not just for Russia, Japan, South Korea, and China, but also the United States,” Helen Teplitskaia, president of the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, wrote in an e-mail message. “New sources of oil, and should the idea of a parallel pipeline materialize, gas as well, will diversify the energy supply and ease dependence on the volatile Mideastern sources.”
With Transneft keeping quiet about its decision to make Perevoznaya the terminus, many outsiders still believe that the planned route follows the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Nakhodka-Vostochny.
But Japanese and American environmentalists are preparing to campaign to pressure the Japan Bank for International Cooperation to condition its loans on a Nakhodka terminus.
“Although we understand the pipeline construction is of great importance to the energy security of Japan, Friends of the Earth Japan believes that J.B.I.C. is not right if they start spending public money without looking at the environmental concerns, such as the possible threat to the survival of Amur leopards,” Eiichiro Y. Noguchi, Russia program director for Friends of the Earth Japan, said in Tokyo.
With a major environmental battle looming, the Japanese development bank is stepping cautiously.
“If J.B.I.C. considers the possibility of financing this project, we have to review, not only in terms of the financial aspect, but of the environmental point of view,” Yoshimi Tamura, spokeswoman for the Japanese development bank, said in Tokyo.
[American and European participation in pipeline construction contracts may be welcome, Victor Khristenko, the industry and energy minister of Russia, hinted last Friday at a news conference in Moscow. Speaking as Japan’s visiting foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, listened, the Russian said, “Russia counts on getting loans that won’t be linked to the purchase of Japanese equipment or technology.”]
In interviews in 2004, Sergei Darkin, governor of the Pacific Maritime region, was a determined backer of building the oil pipeline terminal and refinery in Perevoznaya. Mr. Darkin’s local opponents, including Mayor Viktor S. Gnezdilov of Nakhodka, have accused Mr. Darkin of having financial interests in the Perevoznaya area. The governor has denied the accusation. It is unclear why Mr. Darkin has been able to persuade the Moscow-based pipeline company to shift the terminal to an area that he prefers.
President Putin, who now has power to virtually hire and fire regional governors at will, is known to have chilly relations with Mr. Darkin. If Russian and international outcry becomes too strong, he could veto the plan to bring oil tankers into Perevoznaya Bay, part of the larger Peter the Great Bay, amid fears of threats to three nature reserves, the region’s main beach resorts, and new fish farms for scallops and sea cucumbers.
Two years ago, local environmentalists succeeded in halting a plan to open a coal mine in the middle of the Barsovy Refuge, the core habitat of the endangered leopards.
“People are not trying to eliminate the pipeline – they realize it would be the lifeline of the economy,” said Dale G. Miquelle, an American biologist here for the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York. “Nobody is saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ They are just saying, ‘Do it in the most sensible way.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/business/worldbusiness/21pipeline.html?ex=1107363880&ei=1&en=f78764542f181287
