Berlin - Delivery of pipes for a controversial new gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea begins this week, although the project has yet to win clearance from several nations with Baltic coasts.

The Nord Stream line, the biggest pipeline project ever in the Baltic, is to carry Russian gas to a distribution point in Germany. Poland, Sweden and other nations have voiced opposition to it.

A train is to arrive on Tuesday in Sassnitz, a small German port, with the first load of about 100 steel pipes for the 1,220-kilometre pipeline. Construction is to begin soon of a plant in Sassnitz to coat the 60,000 sections with up to 11 centimetres of concrete.

Later, ships will carry the coated sections out to sea and lower them into place on the seabed.

When completed, the pipeline is to supply western Europe with 27.5 billion cubic metres of Russian gas per year. The German end will emerge from the water at Lubmin, a small town near Greifswald.

Nord Stream, a consortium of Russian, German and Dutch companies, has pressed ahead without waiting for all the permits and is convinced that the Baltic shore nations will yield in the end.

It stresses that the project was adopted in 2006 by the European Union's Commission and Parliament as a project of European benefit, designed to improve the European Union's energy infrastructure.

"We aim to deliver the first gas in 2011," says Nord Stream spokesman Jens D Mueller.

The building timetable had been "optimized" to allow more time for impact studies and negotiations with the authorities, "but we aim to complete the permissions in 2009," he added.

In order to start laying pipes next year, more than one third of the sections, or 400 kilometres of piping, will have to be ready and waiting at the various storage points.

Nord Stream says it has invested more than 100 million euros (155 million dollars) in the most comprehensive environmental-impact studies and plans ever drawn up for a Baltic Sea project.

Sassnitz, a port used by ferries to the eastern Baltic, will be a main logistics base for the laying work, along with Kotka, Finland.

Europipe, a company in the German city of Muelheim an der Ruhr, is to send between 5 and 15 trainloads per week of pipes to Sassnitz.

Each train will haul in 81 to 108 sections of pipe. Concrete coating will begin next year at the plant run by French pipeline company Eupec: its foundations have been poured, its walls are set to go up this summer and it begins operations in January.

Manufacturing the coated pipes, which will have a total weight of 860,000 tons, will cost Nord Stream more than 1 billion euros, but getting them to the seabed will cost more. The total cost of the pipeline is now being estimated at 7.4 billion euros.

There will be no European Union subsidies for the pipeline, Nord Stream says. The shareholders will contribute 30 per cent and the other 70 per cent will be raised from loans, with the burden shared in proportion to stakes of the four partners.

They are Gazprom of Russia, with 51 per cent, Wintershall and E. ON Ruhrgas of Germany with 20 per cent apiece and Gasunie of the Netherlands with 9 per cent. (dpa)