China's Xuan Yuan to be general contractor for oil and gas terminal on Russia-China border
VLADIVOSTOK. Sept 9 (Interfax) - China's Xuan Yuan Industrial Development Co. Ltd will act as the general contractor for the construction of an oil, gas and chemical terminal with a capacity of 7 million tonnes per year near the railway bridge crossing across the Amur River from Nizhneleninskoye in Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region to Tongjiang in China's Heilongjiang Province.
The Roscongress Foundation said in a statement that Russia's United Petroleum and Gas Chemical Company LLC (ONGK), controlled by Mikhail Slipenchuk's Metropol group of companies, and China's Xuan Yuan signed the agreement during the 2025 Eastern Economic Forum.
The contract provides for the construction of industrial and railway infrastructure for the terminal.
The construction will take five years, with the first stage to be commissioned at the end of 2027.
"The main feature of the project is the integrated transit model for seamless connection of the reception, storage and transshipment of oil products, as well as automatic operation of the Russian railway track with a width of 1520 mm and the Chinese track with a width of 1435 mm. The proximity of the terminal to the federal Amur highway and the Trans-Siberian Railway means we can streamline and reduce the cost of logistics in Russia," said Arkady Pinchevsky, chairman of the board of directors of ONGC.
The current volume of investments in the project was not disclosed.
ONGK and Xuan Yuan signed an agreement on joint construction financing, totaling 5 billion yuan, or about $686 million, for the Soyuz land-based, cross-border transshipment complex at the Eastern Economic Forum in 2023.
It was envisaged that the complex would comprise five industrial infrastructure facilities, including an oil terminal/oil storage facility for receiving, storing, blending and loading oil and oil and gas condensate mixtures at up to 5.8 million tonnes per year; an oil depot with vertical and horizontal tanks for receiving, storing and dispensing petroleum products and straight-run fuel oil at up to 1 million tonnes per year; and a gas filling complex for transshipping liquefied petroleum gas and pentane-hexane fraction at up to 650,000 tonnes per year.
A container site is also envisaged for storing and transshipping hazardous products in tank containers at capacity of 100,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) per year, as well as warehouses and hangars of 200,000 square meters for processing large-sized and bulk cargo.
According to the Unified State Registry of Legal Entities (USRLE), ONGK LLC was established in August 2021 with the primary purpose to store and warehouse oil and petroleum products. Zapsibspetsservice LLC, which is indirectly owned by OJSC Zapsibgazprom , owns 51% of ONGK LLC. According to the list of Zapsibgazprom affiliates, the Metropol group of companies owned 77.86% of the shares as at the end of June 2023.
The Metropol group of companies is an investment industrial group that operates in Russia and abroad. The group's companies are involved in stock exchange operations, financial management and consulting, banking and investment activities, exploration and development of deposits, dealings in real estate and tourism services, and support for innovative projects.
The bridge at the Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang border crossing has maximum total throughput capacity of 20 million tonnes of cargo per year. The first cargo shipment crossed the railway bridge in November 2022.
Currently, iron ore from the Kimkan and Sutara iron ore deposits in the Jewish Autonomous Region is supplied to China via the Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang border crossing.
