Work to build facilities in mountain part of Blue Stream gas pipeline nearing completion

The Nadymgazprom company is completing the work to build facilities in the mountain part of the Russia-Turkey gas pipeline Blue Stream.

As the press centre of Nadymstroi said on Wednesday, microtunnelling was used for the first time ever in Russia for overcoming the particularly difficult sections of the mountain part of the gas conduit, for instance, under Kobyla mountain and the Bezymyannyi mountain ridge.

Its essence is that several tunnels were driven through rock, the longest of them having a total stretch of over 2 kilometres. The world's most powerful compressor station Beregovaya was located on the last section of the ground part of the gas pipeline in Drovyanaya Shchel isolated terrain feature near Arkhipo-Osipovka settlement (the Black-Sea coast of the Krasnodar Territory).

All the lines of the marine section of the Blue Stream have been laid at depths of up to 2,150 metres. The extreme point of the Russian-Turkish gas pipeline on the seabed exceeds by more than two times the depths at which the underwater pipelines operate in the world today.

The laying of the gas conduit is controlled by the international and Russian technical and environmental inspectorates which did not reveal any substantial violations during the construction of the linear parts and compressor stations of the gas pipeline.

The first phase of the unique project is slated to be opened in the fourth quarter of this year, the Nadymgazprom press centre officials noted.

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