* South Sudan plans to export 10 pct of output by road
* Plan to export by road not yet finalised
* Country in talks to finance pipeline through Kenya
March 7 (Reuters) - South Sudan, locked in a bitter row over oil transit
fees with neighbour Sudan, plans to export by road at least 10 percent of
its 350,000 barrels-a-day output until pipelines are ready, the Wall Street
Journal reported on Wednesday.
Oil provides about 98 percent of South Sudan's income and is vital to the
impoverished country as it tries to develop infrastructure and institutions
devastated by a war that killed an estimated 2 million people.
The government will use trucks to carry a minimum of 35,000 barrels a day of
its output to Kenya's coastal city of Mombasa and to the coast of Djibouti
while pipelines in Kenya and Ethiopia are being built, the paper quoted the
minister for petroleum and mining, Stephen Dhieu Dau, as saying.
However, the plan to export crude by land was not yet finalised, Dau said,
and he gave no timeframe for its start.
South Sudan seceded last July under a 2005 peace agreement that ended
decades of civil war with Khartoum. But peace remains uneasy at best, with
north and south deadlocked over oil transit fees that have contributed to
recent high global oil prices.
The landlocked new nation took control of about three quarters of the
unified country's oil output of roughly 500,000 barrels a day, but it needs
to export its crude through northern pipelines to the Red Sea port of Port
Sudan.
By June, South Sudan will reach an agreement with companies looking to
finance an alternative pipeline in Kenya, Dau said.
The country is in talks with companies in China, Japan, Europe, South Korea
and the United Stated about financing a pipeline running through Kenya and
another through Ethiopia to Djibouti, he added, without naming the companies
involved.
The Kenya pipeline would carry the Nile blend of crude, while the Ethiopia
pipeline would carry the Dar blend, he added.
(Writing by Himani Sarkar; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
JUBA, March 7 (Reuters) - South Sudan, locked in a row over oil transit fees
with neighbour Sudan, said on Wednesday it plans to build a temporary
underwater oil pipeline along the Nile as part of a project to deliver crude
for export from ports in Kenya and Djibouti.
The pipeline would extend from oilfields to the capital Juba where the crude
would be transferred to trucks and taken on to Kenya and Djibouti, South
Sudan's Minister of Petroleum and Mining Stephen Dhieu Dau told Reuters by
telephone.
Some 30,000 barrels of crude would be delivered to ports under the project,
which could be completed by the end of the year, he said. (Reporting by
Hereward Holland; Editing by Patrick Werr and Sherine El Madany)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Wed Mar 07 2012 - 14:23:15 EST
