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The Primorye Duma approved plans for a $1 billion oil refinery to be built near Dunai, a move it says will ease the region’s energy crisis by allowing it to process crude oil from abroad and eventually from Sakhalin.

The plant, which should start running by the year 2000, will produce power for an area stretching from Khasan to the krai’s northern border, said project manager Igor Dubin, director of Vniprimorneftgas.

“It’s a dramatic solution,” added Duma Deputy Chairman Nikolai Kretsu. “Everyone will have electricity 24 hours a day. Everybody will have heat, and we will make use of refrigeration that will be generated.”

The site will not only include a refinery but also facilities for refrigeration and storage of fish, making the site a major fishing port, Dubin said. “We’ll get the fueling business back, and we’ll get the fishermen back in Primorye,” he said.

Work on the site, which includes a deep-water port, has already begun, officials say.

The funding sources, however, were unusual. An astounding $600 million, officials claim, will be provided by a U.S. organization, International Christian Charity Foundation, based in the United States with a branch office in Moscow. Spokesmen for the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok said they were unfamiliar with the organization, but Zolotoi Rog reported it is an expatriate Russian group.

The Japanese corporation Nishivai also plans to invest in the project, Dubin said. The duma wasn’t asked to put up any money for the facility.

Oil from international wells is cheaper than domestic sources, said Valery Tsymbal, spokesman for Daltechenergo Orgres Co. and Dalenergo Ltd. And it is more fuel efficient than Primorye’s low-grade coal. Local coal burns at 1,800 kilocalories per kilogram, while petroleum provides a toasty 12,000 kilocalories per kilogram, Tsymbal said.

Chairman Nikolai Litvinov said the decision to build the plant was the conclusion to a lengthy process. When he was a deputy in 1990, the Krai Soviet discussed building a nuclear power plant, but environmentalist deputies protested.