China’s Xuan Yuan Industrial Development and Russia’s United Petroleum and Gas Chemical Company signed a 5 billion yuan ($686 million) agreement for the development of an oil transshipment complex in Russia’s far east, according to the Roscongress fund on Monday.
The project, which will receive funding from the Roscongress Foundation for five years, is in accordance with Russia’s ‘leaning towards the east’ approach, particularly after the country labeled its Western customers as ‘unfriendly’ in the wake of sanctions that were placed on Russian fossil fuels due to the war with Ukraine.
‘As part of the VIII Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, an agreement was signed on joint financing of the construction of the Soyuz cross-border transshipment complex in the amount of 5 billion yuan, which will be raised through lending from Russian-Chinese financial institutions,’ said the General Director of United Petroleum and Gas Chemical Company, Alexander Zakharov.
As part of the project, a land cross-border transshipment complex will be built near the new Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang railway bridge crossing in China.
The project also requires the construction of an oil terminal for receiving, storing, blending, and loading crude oil, along with oil and gas condensate mixtures of various qualities, in a volume of up to 5.8 million tons per year.
An oil depot with vertical and horizontal tanks, a gas filling complex, a container site for storage and transshipment of dangerous goods in tank containers and warm and cold warehouses and hangars will also be built as part of the project.
In addition to guaranteeing the final consignees in China an uninterrupted and dependable supply of the full range of cargo under long-term contracts, the construction of the complex in Russia will ensure parity in the volume of export-import cargo transshipment between Russia and China at the Nizhneleninskoye-Tongjiang border crossing.