The $1 billion project, which will run 280 kilometers (175 miles) from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas to Greece's Alexandroupolis, on the Aegean, will allow Russia to export oil through the Black Sea, bypassing the often crowded Bosporus Strait in Turkey.
"We prepared an intergovernmental agreement, and it was sent to Greece and Bulgaria before November 3," Semyon Vainshtok said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. "It is being discussed now."
Vainshtok said Gazprom Neft [SIBN], a subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom [RTS: GAZP], Rosneft [RTS: ROSN], a state-controlled oil company, and Transneft signed an agreement to establish an enterprise where each of the three will hold one-third, or 17%, because Russia's stake in the project is 51%.
The leaders of the three countries adopted in Athens September 4 a joint declaration on energy cooperation under which they agreed to sign an intergovernmental deal on the construction of the pipeline in the Balkans by the end of 2006.
TNK-BP [RTS: TNBP], a Russian-British oil venture, will act as the project coordinator for the pipeline, which has been discussed since 1993 and which will have an initial throughput capacity of 35 million metric tons annually (255 million barrels), before rising to 50 million metric tons (370 million barrels).
