Russian oil company Transneft will start building the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline on April 28, the Russian pipeline operator's chief said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Tomsk on Wednesday.

"We've completed all the procedures necessary to start construction and are ready to start implementing this huge project, the like of which has never been seen before, on Friday," Semyon Vainshtok said.

Earlier, Putin ordered analysis of a possibility of moving the route of the ESPO oil pipeline more than 40 kilometers north of Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water.

Some Russian environmental experts warned that the planned oil pipeline that runs close to Lake Baikal could be ecologically dangerous and called for the project to be rerouted.

The Russian government decided in 2004 to build the pipeline in stages. Its length will span about 4,000 km, most of it underground. The pipeline is designed to ship up to 80 million tons of oil a year with the use of railway capacities.

The first stage of the project is to build an oil pipeline from the town of Taishet in Siberia's Irkutsk region to Skovorodino in the Amur region. It envisions an oil terminal on the shore of Perevoznaya Bay on the Pacific Coast.

Source: Xinhua