Chinese engineers to Sudan for oil pipeline erection

China said today that it will dispatch by the end of the current month some 2,000 engineers to Sudan to start work on a 1540 km-long oil pipeline. Xinhua quoted an official at the Chinese "China National Petroleum Corp." company as saying that China won the contract in 1997.

The official said the pipeline will link oil fields in the southern part of the country with Port Sudan in the northeast where 15 million tons of oil is transported annually.