Russia’s environmental watchdog is demanding a halt to work on a huge Pacific oil pipeline and plans to launch a criminal prosecution, Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia’s Envrionmental Oversight Agency, said on Wednesday.
State pipeline monopoly Transneft says the $11.5 billion pipeline will deliver 80 million tonnes of oil a year (1.6 million barrels per day) to the Pacific market from early next decade.
But Mitvol said the pipeline was planned along a route that had not been approved by the government or environmental experts and was too close to Lake Baikal, which was a serious breach of Russian law and international agreements.
“All the documents will be bound and sent off to the prosecutor general. We will seek criminal charges for illegal felling of trees,” he told a news conference.
He said a firm called ZAO Pirs, a contractor which is leading construction, had already received an order to stop work but had not obeyed it.
“We have environmental legislation and we will demand it is obeyed... There should be a pipeline but it should not spoil the world heritage of Lake Baikal,” he said.
Transneft Vice President Sergei Grigoryev said Transneft had not yet received the order from the environmental agency.
“If we have done something illegal somewhere, we will put it right, if it was us. But I don’t know anything about this.
“Right now we’re doing the feasibility study. We can’t do it if we can’t go along the route. Transneft is not yet building anything and is only doing the first surveys,” he said.
The government has told Transneft to have the first, 600,000 barrel per day, stage of the pipeline ready by mid-2008, but has not yet set a target date for the full capacity to be on stream.
Earlier this year environmental activists sent a letter to the prime minister of Japan, expected to be the main customer for the pipeline’s oil, criticising the decision to route the pipeline through an earthquake-prone zone near Lake Baikal.
“The pipeline could be ruptured in earthquakes, landslides, mudflows, and other geological events which would cause both considerable economic losses and irreversible pollution of the Lake Baikal watershed,” the letter said.
The letter, which was copied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, also said the choice of Perevoznaya Bay on the Pacific as the pipeline’s terminus was “the worst possible place in the Russian Far East to locate an oil terminal and refinery.”
Signatories of the letter include representatives of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.
