MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's state savings bank Sberbank has issued a 11.9 billion ruble ($382.6 million) loan to oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, the bank said Monday.
This is the second loan Sberbank has granted to Transneft this year. In late March Sberbank issued Transneft with a 12.89 billion ruble ($416.3 million) loan to build the East Siberia - Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline system to transport oil from Siberian deposits to the Asia Pacific Region.
The ESPO pipeline is designed to pump up to 1.6 million barrels of crude per day from Siberia to Russia's Far East and then on to energy-hungry China and the Asia-Pacific region. A 1,100-kilometer (680-mile) stretch of the pipeline was opened in early October in Russia's Far Eastern republic of Yakutia.
ESPO's first stage includes the construction of a 2,757-kilometer (1,713-mile) section with a capacity of 30 million tons (220.5 million barrels) of oil per year.
It will link Taishet, in East Siberia's Irkutsk Region, to Skovorodino, in the Amur Region, in Russia's Far East, and is to be commissioned in December 2009, at an expected cost of $12.5 billion.
Transneft owns around 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) of trunk oil pipelines and transports 93% of all crude oil extracted in Russia. The Russian government has a 78% stake in the company.
