Due to Ukraine’s strikes on Baltic ports: Russia faces a gasoline production crisis
28 March 15:12
The suspension of petroleum product exports via the Baltic port of Ust-Luga on March 25 following a drone attack could force major refineries in the European part of Russia to reduce processing volumes due to difficulties in shipping products, Reuters reports, citing market participants, as reported by "Komersant Ukrainian".
According to media reports, the UAV strike at the Ust-Luga terminal damaged a railway trestle used to unload petroleum products from tank cars, and the Ust-Luga Oil terminal stopped receiving shipments on Wednesday, including those from the Kirishinefteorg refinery. “Yaroslavnaftosintez” (YANOS), the Moscow and Ryazan plants. Earlier, on March 22, the neighboring port of Primorsk was struck by drones.
“Primorsk has not been accepting diesel fuel since Monday, and Ust-Luga stopped accepting gasoline and fuel oil on Wednesday. In a few days, we will have to reduce processing to a minimum, and eventually—all the way to a shutdown,” a source at one of the refineries in the European part of Russia told Reuters.
The terminal in Ust-Luga is one of Russia’s main hubs for fuel export transshipment, with a capacity of 30 million tons per year, including 19 million tons of heavy oil products. Actual fuel oil deliveries to the terminal in 2025 amounted to about 18 million tons, of which more than 14 million tons came from the aforementioned refineries, according to traders’ estimates.
According to them, damage to export infrastructure in the Baltic region, which hinders the shipment of fuel oil, is the biggest problem for Russian refineries. “We can still somehow push gasoline and diesel fuel onto the domestic market, but fuel oil is a huge problem,” noted one industry source.
Sources say that refineries supplying fuel for export via Ust-Luga have urgently begun searching for alternative export routes for heavy oil products, as well as optimizing their processing schemes or reducing throughput.
Total oil processing at Kinef, YANOS, the Moscow Refinery, and the Ryazan Refinery Complex, according to traders, amounts to about 55 million tons.
Fuel oil, which accounts for 18% to 35% of the volume of oil processed at these refineries, is not in demand within Russia, so the plants have to export it, whereas gasoline is almost entirely consumed by the domestic market, and diesel fuel—about two-thirds.
For refineries, the inability to export fuel oil threatens to halt operations; at the same time, if production is reduced by cutting back on processing, gasoline output will fall proportionally, which is undesirable during a period of seasonal growth in demand for the product, sources note.
They reported that refineries are currently considering a set of anti-crisis measures to cope with the flow of fuel oil.
“In this situation, fuel oil is the bottleneck product. We’re figuring out how to minimize the output of dark (petroleum) products. We’ll divert as much as possible to bitumen, bunker fuel, and thermal power plants. We’re looking at other ports where we can quickly redirect the dark products. We will have to reduce processing and heavily utilize secondary (capacities),” a source at the refinery reported.
The timeline for resuming the receipt of petroleum products at the terminal in Ust-Luga is currently unknown.
At the same time, one of the port’s fuel oil suppliers—the Kinef refinery—was itself attacked by a UAV on March 26 and may reduce processing for a while, which will partially offset the shortage of throughput capacity for fuel oil transshipment.
However, according to the source’s assessment, it will not be easy to quickly redirect fuel oil volumes to other ports: there are no terminals in the northwest comparable in capacity to Ust-Luga, and shipments to remote ports increase the turnaround time for tank cars—additional capacity is needed.
The Ust-Luga Oil terminal has four two-way railway loading racks, three of which are designed for unloading fuel oil and vacuum gas oil. The racks are capable of simultaneously unloading 526 tank cars. The terminal’s tank farm is designed to store 960,000 cubic meters of petroleum products. Three berths have been built for transshipping fuel to tankers with a deadweight of up to 300,000 tons.
