PRAGUE — Gazprom will make the Dzhubga-Lazarevskoye-Sochi gas pipeline operational on June 6.
"We will have a gala occasion on Monday, June 6 — the launch of the maritime gas pipeline Dzhubga-Lazarevskoye-Sochi," Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller said in Prague at a meeting of the European Business Congress.
Construction of the gas pipeline began on Sept. 28, 2009. Now gas arrives in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi via the Maikop-Samurskaya trunk pipeline at a rate of 1.5 billion to 2 billion cubic meters per year.
The new pipeline runs 177 kilometers, including an underwater segment of 159.5 kilometers across the Black Sea floor about 4.5 kilometers offshore to the Kudepsta automated gas-distribution station near Sochi. The pipeline comes ashore near the towns of Dzhubga, Novomikhailovsky, Tuapse and Kudepsta. The Dzhubga-1, Dzhubga-2, Novomikhailovskaya and Tuapse automated gas-distribution stations have already been built. The pipeline has a diameter of 530 millimeters and daily throughput of about 3.8 bcm of gas.
The pipeline will make it possible to supply energy to the capital of the 2014 Winter Olympics and provide gas to Olympic facilities. It will serve as a stimulus to the gasification of Sochi and the Tuapse area, and reduce energy shortages in the resort zone on the Caucasus coast of the Black Sea.