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RUSSIAN OIL FIRMS UNITE TO TAP INTO U.S. OIL MARKET

MOSCOW: After a year of talk about how to make large-scale oil exports to the United States profitable, the leading Russian oil companies agreed Wednesday to build a pipeline to a new oil-export terminal in Murmansk, the Arctic deep-water port where convoys delivered American war supplies to Russia during World War II.

Chief executives from Lukoil OAO, Yukos Oil Co., Tyumen Oil Co. and Sibneft OAO signed a memorandum of understanding for the project, which would involve a 1,550-mile (2,500 kilometer) connection from Russia’s existing pipeline network to the new terminal on the Barents Sea.

The new route, the companies estimated, could increase Russia’s share of U.S. oil imports to 13 percent from a negligible amount now. Though the project will not deliver oil until at least 2007, it is still seen as strategically important for both Russia and the United States, which has sought to diversify its supplies of oil away from the Middle East.

The Murmansk project, which would eventually carry as much as 1.6 million barrels of oil a day along a route that is closer to the United States than the Gulf, will also provide a much-needed new channel out of Russia, where export capacity, controlled mostly by a state-run monopoly pipeline network called Transneft, is rapidly running out.

The project “will allow us to resolve one of the acute problems for Russian oil companies that limit us in competition on world markets,” said Mikhail Khodorovsky, chief executive of Yukos. “That’s the problem of transport.”

Russia exports 3.2 million barrels of oil a day, making it the world’s second-largest exporter after Saudi Arabia.

THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, Nov. 28, 2002