Manila (AsiaNews) A new pipeline will be built in Thailand in order to avoid that oil tankers from the Middle East sailing through the Malacca Strait. The pipeline will allow as much as seven days off the time it takes to be cut off it takes to ship crude oil to China, Japan, South Korea and Philippines, generating transport savings of about 40 US cents a barrel. From a strategic point of view, the pipeline will reduce the risk that terrorist attacks prevent energetic supplies from reaching East Asian countries.
The project was announced today in Manila, during an interview granted by the leaders of PTT, the biggest Thailand's oil company, at the Asean Business Forum. The PTT aims to construct the pipeline together with Sinopec, a Chinese State company which refines most of the oil in China. The pipeline will cross the peninsula, linking the terminal on the Western coast in the North of Phuket insula with the boarding wharves on the Eastern cost.
The venture also includes a railway, pipeline and storage tanks.
The whole plan may cost as much as US0 million and it should be completed by the year-end.
In the last months, some institutions in Beijing expressed concerns about the strategic safety of energetic supplies in China shipped via sea. In fact, if only two oil tankers sank, it would be enough to block the sea traffic, forcing it to cross the strait: an objective which would not be impossible to a well structured terrorist organisation. As it is immediately evident by observing a geographic map, the sea traffic in such a case would be forced to make a long deviation. For this reason, last months Usa offered to send their own fleet to patrol the narrow corridor which separates Indonesia from Malaysia, two countries whose population is most Muslim and where terrorist attacks and tension are strongly increasing. Malaysia rejected the American's protection in the strait. (MdO)