Nord Stream AG, the Gazprom (GAZP.RS)-led joint venture building an underwater pipeline from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea , said Friday it has secured EUR2.5 billion financing for the second stage of the project.

At a press conference in Berlin , Chief Financial Officer Paul Corcoran said financing for the second stage was below that for the first, as Nord Stream benefited from favorable market conditions.

The company said 24 financial institutions are lending money for the construction of the second stage, and the financing was 60% oversubscribed.

Corcoran also said total construction costs of the Nord Stream pipeline are still expected to total around EUR7.4 billion. Including cost of financing total costs for Nord Steam will be around EUR8.8 billion, Corcoran said previously.

The first pipeline is due to start transporting gas in October, and the second line is expected to be operational in November 2012, Nord Stream said.

The pipeline, with a planned capacity of around 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year, is financed with 70% external funding and 30% equity capital.

In 2010, Nord Stream raised EUR3.9 billion from 26 financial institutions and international banks for the first stage of the pipeline.

Apart from Gazprom , Germany 's Wintershall AG--a unit of BASF AG (BAS.XE)--and E.ON AG (EOAN.XE) as well as Gasunie of the Netherlands and France 's GDF Suez SA (GSZ.FR) own shares in Nord Stream.

Gazprom Chief Executive Andrei Kruglov said Friday that Russian gas supplies are adequate to fill Nord Stream, despite the delayed start-up of Russia 's Shtokman gas field.

"At present we already have enough gas production capacity at existing gas fields to fill the entire Nord Stream pipeline," Kruglov said.

He added that Gazprom considers all of its gas fields as a potential source for Nord Stream. Shtokman is one such fields, although the start of production will take another couple of years.

The Shtokman offshore field--a joint project controlled by Russian state gas giant OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) with France's Total SA (TOT) and Norway's Statoil ASA (STO) as minority shareholders--is a technically challenging project located in icy waters in the Barents Sea around 500 kilometers north of Murmansk. With reserves of 3.9 trillion cubic meters around 53 million tons of gas condensate, Shtokman has enough gas to meet worldwide demand for a year.

An original plan envisioned deliveries of pipeline gas from Shtokman in 2013 and liquefied natural gas by 2014. But a year ago, the project was delayed by three years due to "changes in the market situation and particularly in the LNG market," the three shareholders said at the time.

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