Siberian Times: Major economic boom expected for Siberia in gas, construction and trade deals between Russia and China
The $400 billion gas deal secured the main worldwide headlines along with 49 new agreements to emerge from President Vladimir Putin's meeting with President Xi Jinping.
China will receive gas from Siberia's Kovykta gas field in Irkutsk region and the Chayanda in the Sakha Republic. The supply deal is for 30 years, and agreement ends a decade of negotiations. Putin confounded pundits who predicted this week that the energy deal would fail and declared the exploitation of two gas fields plus tens of thousands of miles of pipelines mean ‘this contract will involve the largest construction project in the world in the next four years, without exaggeration’.
'This is Gazprom's biggest contract. We don't have a contract like this with any other company,' said the Russian giant's chief executive Alexei Miller. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) said that the contract will see the east route pipeline start providing China with 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from 2018.