He said that while construction of the Baltic Pipeline System had been postponed several times, this time the company planned to decide this question by the end of this week. According to the president, the delay has been due to a possible alteration of the project’s design and, in particular, changes to the pipeline’s capacity and the project’s cost. The second stage involves the construction of a 250-km circular pipeline, a new 140-km oil pipeline in the Timano-Pechyrsky district, and several shorter pipelines that are to connect oilfields in the Nenets Autonomous Area with the Transneft network. As a result the system’s capacity will be increased by 50%, and will be around 18m tons/yr, or 360,000brl/d.