 [12.06.06]
The Nord Stream Company has applied for authorization to build a gas pipeline in the exclusive economic areas of Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. The direct pipeline between Russia and Germany on the bottom of the Baltic Sea is a priority of Russia-EU energy cooperation.
The route across the Baltic Seabed has been recognized as the optimal one for transporting Russian gas to the markets of Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Denmark. The project operator company has submitted a detailed study to the Baltic countries’ public for discussion, a study that proves that the gas pipe laying will in no way harm the Baltic region’s fragile environment. Now these countries should brief each other on the discussion results and grant authorizations before the end of the year so that gas pipeline construction could be launched early next year.
The pipeline construction designers have used the topmost standards of pipe-laying security with due regard for the seabed relief. This provides for minimizing ecological risks, claims one of the leaders of the Russian gas giant GAZPOM Alexander Medvedev, and elaborates.
We haven’t just scribed a line to show the route, Medvedev says, we have first engaged ourselves in research, one that took quite some time to make. In short, the route has been chosen the way that avoids putting to risk either the pipe, or navigation, or fishing, or, naturally, ordinary citizens. So, the chosen route rules out crashing into unexploded munitions. Now, if we accidentally do bump into these during the laying of the pipeline, we have a special procedure we will use to defuse and transport them. So no one should grow concerned about risks related to war-time chemicals or bottom mines.
The parties to the recent discussion of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic countries recently fished out precisely that reason to oppose a number of western politicians urging that Europeans should resist the temptation to swallow new Russian bait. And, Alexander Medvedev says, they opposed such appeals quite effectively.
I’d like to point out, Alexander Medvedev says, a change in tonality, touch wood. It is only recently that some Europeans flatly rejected the project, ruling out the very possibility of discussion, whereas now that the report on ecological aftermath has been approved and submitted, we are witnessing a constructive stand on the situation.
Nord Stream is a priority of Russia-EU energy cooperation. That is why the parties to the hearings on granting authorization to laying the pipeline in an exclusive economic area of this or that Baltic country should proceed exclusively from views of professionals, rather than politicians. Priority should be given to the commercial expediency of the project and its role in ensuing the continent’s extra needs for energy resources, rather than to political concoctions about the threat that Nord Stream poses to European security.
[ (Source: ”The Voice of Russia”) russia-media.RU Murmansk & Shtokman News / FLAIT Murmansk ]
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