Infrastructure boom hits capital desert
Two pipelines will run in parallel for 1,210 kilometres under the Baltic sea, from Vyborg in Russia, just north of St Petersburg, close to the border with Finland, running between the Baltic states and Poland to the south and Sweden and Denmark to the north before making land at Greifswald in Germany.
Back in 2005, it was estimated that the European Union’s annual requirement for gas imports would rise from 336 billion cubic metres to 536bcm in 2015. The pipeline under the Baltic is designed to supply just over 25%, 55bcm, of that increased 200bcm annual requirement.
The justification for running the pipeline under the sea is that it will be shorter, cheaper and have a greater capacity than a land-based pipeline and also be less damaging to the environment.
It will not be easy, though, and Nord Stream has been set a tight deadline to complete the project and begin delivery by spring 2011.
| "The show must go on. They must do some business. And we think this project ticks all the boxes from a credit committee point of view" Paul Corcoran, Nord Stream |
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Most people working on the financing of large infrastructure projects betray greater excitement at the engineering details than in discussing the financing and Paul Corcoran, CFO of Nord Stream, is no exception, as he describes some of the constraints that the delivery schedule entails.
