OREANDA-NEWS. The Sarmatia consortium in charge of construction of the Odesa - Brody oil pipeline to Gdansk must be enlarged through new participants - Kazakhstan, Moldova and Belarus, Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jacek Kluczkowski said, reported the Official website www.kmu.gov.ua. 

As he noted, presently, the project must shift to the phase of implementation of earlier agreements. Cooperation returns will be summed up in spring 2008 at an energy summit in Kyiv, the Ambassador said.

"It is very important that Azerbaijan joins the project, which is hydrocarbon supplier, and Georgia, which is an important transit nation," Kluczkowski said. He also promised that Poland will soon settle the issue of land allotment for the pipeline.

On October 10 Vilnius hosted an energy conference, during which Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Georgia decided to launch the construction of the oil pipeline to Plock. The countries have established the Sarmatia consortium to this end and scheduled the pipeline's commissioning for 2011.

The active Polish -Ukrainian company Sarmatia was joined by Azerbaijan's Soca, Georgia's GOGC and Lithuania's Klaipedos nafta.

The pipeline section between Odesa and Brody is operational and now it is must be extended to the Polish city of Plock, where the Polish biggest oil refinery is situated, owned by the Orlen concern, and then to Gdansk.

Strategically, the oil pipeline is regarded as a European element of the Eurasian oil transportation corridor, which links to the Caspian basin via the Baku-Supsa oil pipeline and via tankers in the Black Sea. The project initiators view Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan as basic potential suppliers. Oil can be supplied from Gdansk to Lithuania on tankers via the Butinge oil terminal.

The oil pipeline, as participants in the project believe, will serve an alternative to Russian oil supplies and will facilitate oil supplies from the Caspian and Black Sea regions to the Baltic sea region.