The Press Secretary of the “Gazpromneft” company, Natalia Vialkina, in her phone conversation with the Radio “Liberty” confirmed the circulated rumors about the intentions of their company to build a huge oil-producing plant in Armenia. Vialkina didn’t mention when concrete decisions will be made. She didn’t answer whose intention it is to build such a plant in the territory of RA. She said that in fact the project is “interesting for both of the parties”. The plant is planned to be built near the border of Iran, in Meghri. According to the experts the project will cost approximately 1 billion 700 million USD. And if we count the fact tat it’s necessary to build a transportation system and a pipeline, we’ll have to add another 1 billion USD to the mentioned amount. The Russian sources mention that Robert Kocharyan during his private visit to Moscow has discussed this issue with the management of the “Gazpromneft” company and the Minister of Industry and Energy of RF, Victor Khristenko. However, the Ministry doesn’t comment on those statements. The Director of the “Russian Railroads” company, Vladimir Yakunin has also confirmed the January 17 meeting with Kocharyan. According to Radio Liberty, the Russian experts thinks that this project is economically not quite profitable for Russia because usually such plants are built near sea ports or oil pipelines and Armenia has neither the first one nor the second one. The plant is planned to be quite powerful and is going annually to provide 7 million tons oil. The product produced by the plant will be spent outside Armenia. At this moment the Iranian oil must be reproduced in the Armenian plant and be sold to Iran. Many of the experts think that this is a political project. However, several experts, for example, Oleg Maximov, representing the “Troyka Dialog” Company has another opinion. “Today the whole world lack oil producing plants. Those plants are always profitable and now it’s too soon to speak about the political context of the project,” he said.
