( Itar -Tass) - Following Thursday's conference in the Far-Eastern city of Khabarovsk on the development of oil and gas pipeline systems in the Russian Far East, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has issued instructions to the Ministry of Industry and Energy, the major producer of natural gas, OAO Gazprom, and the oil company Rosneft to pay more attention to the overly dragged-out talks on construction of a gas pipeline from the island of Sakhalin to Khabarovsk.
Government sources said Friday Medvedev had told top officials and executives at the ministry and the two corporations to take personal control over the necessary decisions, including the ones of commercial nature, given the importance of beginning regular supplies of natural gas to the Primorsky /Maritime/ territory in 2011 at the latest.
Medvedev also told top decision-makers at Gazprom and the Ministry of Natural Resources to ensure the availability of resources for starting gas supplies to continental areas of the Far East.
Thursday, Medvedev issued a tough order to Gazprom and Rosneft to round out talks on construction of a pipeline from Sakhalin and Vladivostok at an earliest possible date so that people in the latter city could get full-scale access to pipeline gas utility in 2011.
Gazprom's Deputy CEO Alexander Ananenkov told the conference in Khabarovsk that a decision on building the pipeline from Sakhalin to the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Khabarovsk territory to Khabarovsk had been taken on the whole.
The pipeline will have a design capacity for 4.5 billion cubic meters /bcm/ of gas a year but the actual operating capacity will be slightly less than 2.0 bcm.
"It hasn't been fully completed while the section between Sakhalin and Komsomolsk-on-Amur is in an extremely bad technical condition. It is an old system and it belongs to Rosneft," Ananenkov said.
"As for the new route, only the linear section of it has been built, while other facilities don't exist yet," he said.
"We handed our proposals to Rosneft and other participants in the project supported us," Ananenkov said. "Gazprom must join the project to build a system from Sakhalin to Komsomolsk and to bring it eventually to the design throughput of 4.5 bcm."
"Then we'll extend the system by another 900 kilometers from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok so that people in that city could get gas as of 2011," he said.
When Medvedev asked him what kind of a problem was there, which did not allow everyone to move ahead faster, Ananenkov complained about a slow pace of talks with Rosneft.
"Then I'll give a boost to you and to Rosneft, too," Medvedev said. "If two large government-controlled companies can't reach agreement and this affects the interests of people in the Far East, will you think then please that I've already given a tough order to you."