Efforts of Oil Patriots Produce Dry Pipeline
On February 22 Kyiv hosted a shareholders meeting of Ukrnaftoterm, one of Ukraine’s leading builders of the Pivdenny Oil Terminal near Odesa. The owners of this organization have more than enough issues to discuss. This week, following urgent requests from Odesa authorities, prompted not so much by the city’s jubilee as by the election campaign, the waters of the gem of the Black Sea were to receive the first tanker with technical oil to fill the Odesa-Brody pipeline.
It did not happen. According to Oleksandr Todiychuk, Ukraine’s special representative in charge of the Eurasian oil transport corridor and Ukrtransnafta chairman of the board, it was decided not to link the tanker’s arrival to any specific date and postpone this event until March for organizational and technical reasons. Judging by his failure to name the concrete date, March might well turn into April. The more so that Mr. Todiychuk revealed the owners of the oil have a very tight delivery schedule for the first quarter.
Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to make stubborn attempts to break through to the European oil market by means of the oil transport corridor. An Ukrtransnafta delegation has just returned from Houston, Texas, which hosted the annual Cera Week 2002 Conference and, as part of it, the Eurasian Transport Forum. Mr. Todiychuk’s papers, “Bypassing the Bosporus” and “Energy of the Caspian Countries,” aroused great interest. An Ukrtransnafta press release says these papers emphasized that “the government of Ukraine has set a clear goal to streamline Ukraine’s oil transport sector, putting it on a Western commercial basis, in order to improve its economic efficiency and ensure environmental protection, safety, market approaches to and transparency of the business... Ukraine invites all potential partners to effectively utilize it.”
This is precisely the point. After the “ambitious” government of Viktor Yushchenko had made attempts, contrary to Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council’s recommendations, to lay the oil transport corridor without attracting foreign investors, the latter took quite a cautious approach to Ukraine’s further efforts to set up an international consortium to run the pipeline. Nothing was done at that time to fill the Ukrainian pipe with oil. According to Mr. Todiychuk, everyone says he is interested in the consortium but nobody has expressed a desire to participate. On March 5-7, representatives of the Halliburton Kellogg Brown & Root and Cera companies, which are studying commercialization of the Odesa- Brody pipeline, are to report to a multilateral task force headed by First Vice Premier Oleh Dubyna on the work done and the prospects of the Ukrainian oil transport corridor. So far, as Mr. Todiychuk’s press conference showed, everything is confined to vague promises.
Asked by The Day about further prospects, one of the greatest oil pipeline enthusiasts and initiators said, “Very foggy.” Meanwhile, Mr. Todiychuk himself, telling about the ongoing diagnostic check of the pipeline, noted that the troublemakers who intend to siphon off oil from the pipeline feel far more optimistic than the pipe people themselves. The diagnostics has already helped to find and repair the first criminal hole.
