SEOUL, Nov 8: Russia, China and South Korea will decide next week on whether to include energy-starved North Korea in a $11 billion project to pipe Siberian natural gas into the Korean peninsula, officials said on Saturday.

The three countries will officially complete the feasibility study at a meeting in Moscow on November 14, the commerce, industry and energy ministry here said in a statement.

But the ministry did not confirm a news report that the study results themselves are proposing to exclude North Korea from the multinational project.

They have yet to agree on the feasibility study results, which will be finalized on November 14, the ministry statement said. Each is supposed to get government approval for the feasibility study results by March in 2004 to launch the project.

Earlier, the Seoul-based JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said the three-year joint feasibility study concluded that gas pipelines should bypass North Korea due to hefty costs and safety reasons.

The route to run through North Korea requires more investment and operational costs than others and also raises security issues as it passes through the inter-Korean military border, an official told JoongAng.

The study, set to be announced next week, instead suggested that the pipelines from the Kovytka gas field near Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, should link up to South Korea through China and the Yellow Sea.

The consortium is to meet in Irkutsk on Wednesday to discuss the joint feasibility study results, and seeks to sign a deal at a meeting in Moscow on Friday, it said.

But Seoul officials said more talks would open in March next year.

Seoul had pushed for natural gas pipelines to run through North Korea because the project could help ease Pyongyang’s chronic energy shortages and settle a crisis over its nuclear ambitions.

North Korea has sparked US-led international concerns over its reactivation of a mothballed nuclear power plant capable of producing weapons grade plutonium.

Some officials in Seoul propose to offer natural gas to North Korea in return for ending the communist state’s nuclear program.

The three-nation natural gas project was first proposed in 1995. The feasibility study began in 2001. Construction is expected to start in 2004.

South Korea expects to annually import around seven million tons of natural gas from Russia over the next 30 years from 2008 when the project is completed.

The proposed 4,000-kilometer (2,400-mile) link of pipelines is a mega construction work to cost $11 billion (9.3 billion euro), according to South Korean experts.

Companies joining the project includes Kovytka gas-field licence holder RUSIA-Petroleum, and Russian oil majors BP-TNK and Interos. Their counterparts are the Korean Gas Corp. and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation. —AFP