United Petrochemical Company, a Russian entity, has reached an agreement with China’s Xuan Yuan Industrial Development to co-finance the development of a 5bn yuan ($685.41m) trans-shipment oil facility.

Located in the Amuro-Khinganskaya Advanced Special Economic Zone, the Soyuz facility will be built near the railway bridge crossing between Russia’s Nizhneleninskoye and China’s Tongjiang.

The Roscongress Foundation, which has supported the project for five years, claims that the complex would balance the amount of export-import cargo that is trans-shipped between Russia and China.

Additionally, it will guarantee the consistent and reliable shipment of a variety of cargo to final recipients in China in line with long-term agreements.

The project is also anticipated to increase tax collections at all budgetary levels and generate new, highly qualified jobs.

United Petrochemical Company will be in charge of executing the project.

The plan envisions building an oil depot, an oil storage facility, a gas-filling complex for liquefied hydrocarbon gas trans-shipment, a container yard for storing and trans-shipping hazardous cargo, as well as warehouses and hangars to handle large-size and large-tonnage cargo.

The oil depot will feature vertical and horizontal tanks with a capacity of up to one million tonnes per annum (mtpa) for receiving, storing and dispensing a variety of oil products and straight-run fuel oil.

With a capacity of up to 5.8mtpa, the oil storage facility will be used to accept, store, blend and load crude oil, oil and gas condensate mixtures of various quality.

United Petrochemical Company general director Alexander Zakharov said: “As part of the 8th Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, an agreement was signed to jointly finance the construction of the Soyuz cross-border trans-shipment complex to the tune of 5bn yuan, which will be raised through loans from Russian-Chinese financial institutions.”