The Financial Times reported from Cairo yesterday that four West European consortiums representing Britain, France, Italy and West Germany are bidding to construct a $130 million oil pipeline which the Egyptian Government appears determined to build, by-passing the Suez Canal. According to the Times, the 42-inch pipeline would extend 110 miles to a Mediterranean outlet at Alexandria. Its southern end would be located on the shores of the Gulf of Suez, some 30 miles south of the canal entrance and well out of range of Israeli artillery on the canal’s east bank, the paper said.
(A British oil expert addressing a transportation seminar in Evanston, III. last week predicted that neither the projected Egyptian pipeline or the $100 million Israeli pipeline now under construction between Eilat and Ashkelon would be able to compete economically with supertankers in the transportation of oil from the Persian Gulf to northwest Europe.)
(The Israeli pipeline is expected to have an initial capacity of 19 to 20 million tons when it is completed in 1969 and an ultimate capacity of 50 million tons per year. The Egyptian pipeline is expected to begin with an annual capacity of 50 million tons.)
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