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A Vladivostok-based fishing company is the first of many Primorye businesses expected to benefit from the influx of money to the oil projects of Sakhalin Island.

DalRyba was recently awarded a contract by the Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. Ltd. to tow a $35 million steel oil platform base, or «spacer,» from Bolshoi Kamen to Pusan, South Korea. According to Anatoly Tsygankov, chief of the Expeditionary Division for the DalRyba’s Rescue Fleet, three of the fleet’s eight tugboats at the end of March will tow the spacer to the South Korean port. There it will be mated with an existing arctic offshore drilling unit before being towed to Sakhalin.

Tsygankov noted that while this sort of work was somewhat unusual for his boats, which typically support DalRyba’s fishing fleet, the tugboats are fully capable of towing the spacer.

Once the platform is fully assembled in August of this year, it will be towed from South Korea to the Sakhalin II Piltun-Astokhskoye oil field off the island’s north shore, said David Loran, regional director of Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. Ltd. Contracts for towing the 24,000-plus-ton platform to its final destination off Sakhalin will be awarded later this year, said Loran. Drilling is expected to begin at the field in October.

The DalRyba towing contract -- along with the spacer itself, which the Amur Shipbuilding Factory constructed in Komsomolsk-na-Amure -- is further evidence of the far-reaching economic effects that the island’s oil and gas projects will have on Sakhalin, Primorye, and the entire Russian Far East.

Collectively, the five oil fields of the two primary Sakhalin projects, Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II, are estimated to be worth $25 billion in foreign investment. That sum, when considered with the potential economic multiplier effect of eight times per dollar invested, is expected to bring substantial benefits to companies and individuals throughout the region.

By March of last year, Exxon Neftegas Ltd., one of four operators for Sakhalin I, had awarded 90 contracts to Russian and foreign firms, mostly for surveying and test drilling, according to Tanya Shuster, senior Russia trade specialist with the Business Information Service for the Newly Independent States. As the oil and gas projects further develop, many oil companies will contract out other services such as communications inspection and security services, transportation, fuel supplies, and housing construction, Shuster said.

In addition to requiring to substantial infrastructure improvements on Sakhalin Island and in the neighboring krais, the projects will also attract expatriate workers whose demands for consumer goods and services not readily available on the island may also provide business opportunities.