It helps when the company carrying more than 90% of the country’s oil is government controlled. When Russia wanted to build a new pipeline across Siberia to the Pacific, it commissioned a study and the environmental impacts of such a route. Energy-rich Russia is the second biggest state exporter of oil, with some 10 million barrels transported each day (compared with 20 million barrels for all of the middle east combined). With China in particular becoming a larger consumer of oil, Russia would not let an opportunity pass to become the oil exporter of choice.

On this day, December 28, in 2009, the new Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean Pipeline opened, carrying crude 2,500 miles from Taishet in eastern Siberia to Nakhodka and into China and the near east.

Not long before work started on the pipeline, China surpassed Japan as the biggest importer of oil. To them, Russian exports would provide insurance against the unstable politics of the middle east, where half of their oil came from. And since most of those imports would come by tanker via the Straits of Malacca, subject to potential American disruption, the pipeline had the added benefit of making them more secure in any conflicts with the West. Russia, for their part, saw a pipeline to China and Japan as a way to diversify from exports just to the European market.