Proposed Sillamae plant Estonia's biggest industrial investment since independence restoration

Car fuel will become one of the products that Estonia exports if, in three years' time, businessman Aleksei Skidanov, who has previously been active in Russia's telecommunications sector, succeeds in his plan to open a 880 million euro petrol plant in the north-eastern town of Sillamae, Postimees writes.

The company's representatives said that the plant's construction will be mainly financed by loans but despite that it will be the biggest direct industrial investment in Estonia since the restoration of the country's independence in 1991, exceeded only by the 1.3 billion cost of Rail Baltic, writes Postimees.

Last week, OÜ Jukonoil put the project to public debate in Sillamae. The factory, if constructed, will process 2.4 million tonnes of oil imported from Russia a year. A tenth of the raw material will be gas condensate, a by-product of gas exploration.

"We're going to produce nearly a hundred different products, the lion's share of which will be petrol and diesel fuel, but from the production waste substances we will produce, for example, lubricants," explained Jukonoil's technical director Igor Kleiner. "We intend to export to Florida, the United States, for example, where there are particularly high car fuel quality requirements." Jukonoil will employ approximately 250 employees, but other associated services needed for the factory to operate may increase that to over 300.

If Sillamae town council gives Jukonoil a construction permit following the public debate regarding the environmental impact of the plant, the design and construction will take up to 30 months.

The Jukonoil project will be extraordinary also for the impact on the port of Sillamae: it will require the construction of four terminals and a truck parking facility, and will cover a total of 65 hectares, taking up nearly a tenth of the total area of the port.

Despite the fact that the Jukonoil factory could provide work to the majority of unemployed people in Sillamae, who numbered around 440 at the end of last year, there are active opponents to the project in the historically industrial town who say that the concentration of potentially dangerous industrial companies in one area in Sillamae is already most likely the highest in Estonia, that the factory would be located just 700 metres from residential areas, and that pollution levels in the town are already close to the permitted limits.