Russia said on Friday it had ordered the construction of an oil pipeline from its huge Siberian oilfields to the Pacific Ocean opposite Japan, in a move to boost export opportunities throughout East Asia and to the US.
A "system of pipelines" with an annual capacity of 80 million tonnes would be built from Taishet in Siberia to Perevoznaya near Vladivostok and the eastern port of Nakhodka, the government said in a statement.
Energy-thirsty Asian rivals Japan and China have been furiously competing for several years for access to supplies from the world's second biggest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.
But the 4,130km link to Nakhodka become the preferred option earlier this year after lengthy talks with Tokyo, which has said it would finance its construction.
No price tag was put on the project on Friday, but Russian officials have said previously it would cost some US$16 billion or almost seven times the cost of the alternative option to China.
Moscow's decision to pump its vast eastern Siberian oil supplies toward Japan will come as a blow to China, whose energy-hungry economy has turned it into the world's second largest oil consumer after the US.
Negotiations with China were complicated by environmental concerns, with neither side able to agree on the route.
And for Russia, the Pacific route means that besides Japan, it could supply oil to other countries in the region, including South Korea, and even, potentially, the west coast of the US.
Officials in Beijing have raised the possibility that a branch of Russia's Pacific pipeline could be diverted eventually to China, where energy demand continues to outpace supply, although there was no mention of this in Friday's statement from Moscow.
But in a major sweetener for Beijing, Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko on Thursday announced that Chinese oil conglomerate CNPC could be offered up to 20 percent of the main asset of the dismembered Russian energy supplier Yukos.
In what would amount to a strategic energy tie-up between Russia and China, Khristenko said China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) could end up owning a significant chunk of the assets of Yuganskneftegaz, which pumps a million barrels a day and owns 17 percent of Russia's oil reserves.
Moscow has signed agreements with CNPC reflecting bilateral "strategic understandings" on the expansion of energy cooperation, deemed vital to long-term economic growth in both countries, he said.
Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a political enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was a strong supporter of the China option for the eastern Siberian pipeline. He has been in jail since October last year, facing fraud and tax evasion charges, and his company is being dismantled to pay a massive bill for back taxes.
Russia is also proposing to pump oil west towards the Adriatic and ports in Albania, Croatia and Greece, and north to serve North America via a Barents Sea port, as it strives to boost its ability to supply rising demand in international markets.
In October Khristenko said Russia's international oil pipelines would transport 303 million tonnes a year by 2010 and 433 million tonnes by 2020. Last year the pipeline network handled 182 million tonnes of Russia's total exports of 223 million tonnes.
Russian production of crude oil should reach between 550 and 590 million tonnes per year by 2020 owing to development of resources in western Siberia and the Far East, the energy minister has said.
The state energy agency has forecast oil production will increase by six percent to eight percent from last year's output of 421 million tonnes.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS