Vostok Oil begins building underwater section of oil pipeline across Yenisei to Bukhta Sever

MOSCOW. Jan 25 (Interfax) - Work has started on the underwater section of an oil pipeline across the Yenisei River, which will stretch to Bukhta Sever, for Rosneft's Vostok Oil project, Deputy Russian Prime Minister Alexander Novak said in an op-ed for the Energy Policy magazine.

"As part of the largest investment project in the global oil and gas industry, Vostok Oil, construction has begun on the underwater section of the trunk oil pipeline across the Yenisei River, which will become part of the large-scale 770-kilometer Vankor-Paiyakha-Bukhta Sever oil pipeline," he said.

Rosneft had already built a quarter of the pipeline as of November 2023. "As of today, 200 km of the pipeline has already been laid out of 770 km," Rosneft Vice President and Chief Geologist Andrei Polyakov said at a the time. "Our own oil transportation artery will allow us to control the quality of oil throughout: from production to delivery to the end consumer," he said.

The Vostok Oil project envisages development of oil fields on the Taimyr Peninsula. The Vostok Oil project's resource base is more than 6.5 billion tonnes of premium low-sulfur oil. It includes 52 licenses in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District, where 13 oil and gas fields are located, including the fields of the Vankor and Payakha clusters. Rosneft planned to ship 30 million tonnes of oil from Vostok Oil via the Northern Sea Route in 2024.

The Bukhta Sever oil terminal should be commissioned in 2024. Capacity will grow in line with the development of Vostok Oil: from 25 million tonnes, then up to 50 million tonnes, reaching a full capacity of 115 million tonnes in 2030. In parallel with the construction of the port, tankers will be built to transport oil along the Northern Sea Route.