RZD and Gazprom to Implement the Construction of the NLR

Russian Railways and PJSC Gazprom signed an agreement on the joint implementation of the investment project for the construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway (NLR) Obskaya-Salekhard-Nadym-Pangody-Novy Urengoy-Korotchaevo and railway approaches to it.

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The document was signed by President of JSC Russian Railways Oleg Belozerov and Chairman of the Board of PJSC Gazprom Alexey Miller.
The aim of the project is to ensure the export of cargo from the fields of the northern regions of Western Siberia and reduce the length of transport routes to northwestern ports.

The project will be implemented with the involvement of private investors under a concession scheme. The main participants (Russian Railways, Gazprom, and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug) will finance the facilities of its existing railway infrastructure, and the construction of new facilities will be performed by the concessionaire.

Pursuant to the agreement, Gazprom will create a special subsidiary company that will ensure the completion of the construction and commissioning of its own railway line: Nadym-Pangody (112 km).

It is intended that the Russian Federation will act as a concessor, and the concessionaire is a special project company (SPC-Concessionaire), a subsidiary of JSC Russian Railways, whose shareholders may also be interested investors.

Under the concession agreement, SPC-Concessionaire will provide financing, construction and operation of the Obskaya-Salekhard-Nadym line. In particular, the railway section of the bridge across the Ob River and approaches to it, the new Salekhard-Nadym railway section (353 km), and the railway section of the bridge across the Nadym River and approaches to it will be built.

Russian Railways, as part of its investment program, will reconstruct the adjacent Konosh-Kotlas-Chum-Labytnangi sections of the Northern Railway, including the Ob station, and the Pangody-Novy Urengoy-Korotchaevo railway line of the Sverdlovsk Railway.
In turn, the administration of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug will act as an investor in the construction of the automobile part of the bridge across the Ob and provide the necessary project documentation. Also, the region will provide the land plots needed for the construction of the highway to the federal government and access to water bodies and forest areas for construction workers, as well as provide benefits on property tax. Recall that the corresponding agreement was signed between JSC Russian Railways and Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug on October 19, 2016.

The construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway is planned to be carried out from 2018 to 2022. The total length of the line is 707 km. The projected traffic volume will amount to 23.9 million t (mainly gas condensate and oil cargo).