The project is seen as also opening Chad's access to foreign exchange and social development. The project has been special from the start. Chad, being landlocked and ravaged by internal conflicts, has had to make fundamental changes to obtain the needed international capital to exploit its rich oil resources. Petroleum was discovered in southern Chad 30 years ago, and the country has been waiting anxiously ever since for the right combination of international prices and private interest to develop the resource. The pipeline project will provide Chad with a unique opportunity to lift itself out of its extreme poverty, the World Bank has assessed, and the additional revenues could remove the bottlenecks that constrain growth and create opportunity for the next generation of Chadians. It has already served in bringing reconciliation to several of the traditionally-conflicting parties of Chad. On December 30, 1998, Chad’s Parliament approved a law that sets out the Government's poverty-reduction objectives and details arrangements for the use of the revenues. Under the law, 10% of the royalties and revenues will be held in trust for future generations, 80% of the remaining funds will be devoted to education, health and social services, rural development, infrastructure, and environmental and water-resource management, and 5% will be earmarked for regional development in the oil-producing area. The environmental side of the project was also taken seriously. The World Bank, which is contributing with only 2.5% of the financing, had demanded this before giving its support, and significant changes were in consequence made to the proposed right-of-way. As a result, the project will have only a minor net effect on the natural and human environments. The pipeline will be buried, rather than above ground. For most of the route it follows existing infrastructure. No-one will need to be resettled along the 1,070-km route, although a maximum of 150 families (probably many fewer) may be displaced where the oil itself will be produced. The Chad-Cameroon pipeline project will cost an estimated US$ 3.7 billion. The financing is being used to develop the oil fields at Doba in southern Chad, and construct the 1070-km pipeline to an offshore oil-loading facility at Kribi, a popular holiday resort on Cameroon's Atlantic coast. According to Michel Gallet the director general of Cotco, the company that will construct the pipeline, effective construction work will begin early next year and is expected to last for three years.