Russian agency rejects Siberia pipeline

Russia’s environmental safety body rejected a plan for a controversial crude oil pipeline that ecologists have said could threaten the world’s biggest freshwater lake.

The proposals for the pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast were not in line with environmental legislation, the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Supervision — known by its Russian abbreviation Rostekhnadzor — said in a statement posted on its Web site Feb. 3.

The decision is a blow for state pipeline monopoly Transneft, which had backed a route passing within a kilometer (less than a mile) of Lake Baikal, which is a UNESCO protected site and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Transneft’s proposal had also envisaged the construction of an oil terminal in a pristine Pacific Coast bay instead of closer to the port of Nakhodka, which analysts say would have been a more expensive variant.

The pipeline route, as proposed by Transneft, would run from the town of Tayshet in Siberia’s Irkutsk region through Skovorodino in the Amur region to the port of Perevoznaya in the Primorye region on the Pacific coast.

Separately, Russia’s Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said in an interview published Feb. 6 in the Vedomosti business daily that tax breaks would be offered to investors developing fields in Eastern Siberia and the Far East that could be used to fill the pipeline.

—The Associated Press