UPDATED 7:48 AM EST, January 14, 2013
At a lavish ceremony in December to mark the start of construction of a new pipeline to Europe, Gazprom put on a show of its industrial might to match the project's €1 billion ($20.92 billion) price tag. On the Black Sea coast, 600 miles south of Moscow, the company built a eight massive steel-framed marquees to house Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Gazprom's executives and various European partners — all for a two-hour ceremony in which two short sections of the new South Stream pipeline were welded together.
