Royal Dutch Shell says it has taken less than a month to clear all ecological violations on Russia’s Pacific island of Sakhalin as the group’s USD 20 billion project awaits new state probes. Russia’s ecological agency RosPrirodNadzor has threatened to withdraw ecological permits from the project and force it to re-route the pipelines, which Shell said may cause more delays to the project to supply Asia-Pacific markets. RosPrirodNadzor has yet to give Shell’s operations a clean bill of health and its investigations will continue for several weeks. Russia’s Resources Ministry Yuri Trutnev will also head to Sakhalin on 24-26 October. The pipeline stretch was portrayed on Russian TV as an ecological disaster zone when the environmental agency launched its probe last month. But Shell said the violations were minimal, otherwise it could not have rectified them so quickly. The pipelines, some 850km long, will cross the entire island and pass under 1100 rivers to bring offshore oil and gas from north Sakhalin to the island’s south, where an oil terminal and the world’s largest LNG plant are being built. The pipeline is being built by StarStroi, a venture of Italy’s Saipem and Russian firms, which hired many Russian sub-contractors as under the PSA law the project’s Russian content must be at least at 70%.
