RusEnergy

22 May 2008 - Upstream OnLine - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said today that Russia and China are close to reaching an agreement on building a pipeline connecting Siberia’s oil fields to energy-hungry China. “We currently have a basic agreement on this and today are at the concluding stage in talks between Rosneft and CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation), Russia’s and China’s state oil companies,” Agence France Presse quoted Medvedev as saying in an interview posted to the Kremlin’s Web site. Medvedev said there had been “unprecedented, huge growth” in Russian energy exports to China from supplies worth $500 million in 2001 to around $6.7 billion in 2007. The Kremlin chief said joint Chinese-Russian projects for increasing oil-refining capacity in Russia were also under discussion, as were plans for building two major gas pipelines routes from Russia to China. The oil pipeline would be a branch of a bigger 4200-kilometre (2600-mile) trunk line between the Siberian city of Taishet and Russia’s Pacific coast and would run to the Chinese oil hub of Daqing.