Russia has accumulated millions of barrels of unsold oil due to US sanctions
11 November 17:12
Consignments of Russian oil exported by tankers from seaports are increasingly left without buyers due to US sanctions imposed on Rosneft and Lukoil.
According to Reuters, two tankers with about 1.5 million barrels of Urals crude oil were forced to anchor near the Suez Canal and turned into “floating storage facilities,” "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
The Sikar tanker, which loaded on October 6 in the Baltic port of Primorsk and was headed to Port Said, stopped at the entrance to the Suez Canal on October 24 and has been without movement since then. The tanker Monte 1 has also been anchored for almost two weeks: it loaded in Primorsk on October 7 and stopped shortly after passing the Suez Canal on October 30.
According to Bloomberg, by early November, the volume of Russian oil on tankers at sea reached 380 million barrels. Since the beginning of September, it has increased by about 30 million barrels as refineries began to refuse to accept cargo.
Five Indian refineries, which accounted for two-thirds of all supplies from Russia, have completely stopped buying Russian oil. These are Reliance Industries, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals, and HPCL-Mittal Energy.
Chinese state-owned companies Sinopec and PetroChina also announced a “boycott” of direct purchases from Lukoil and Rosneft. They were joined by small private refineries that fear being sanctioned, as has already happened to Shandong Yulong Petrochemical, which is on the blacklists of the UK and the EU. according to Rystad Energy, the “buyers’ strike” has affected almost 45% of Russia’s oil exports to China.
At the same time, India and China buy about 90% of Russia’s oil exports. The rest goes to Turkey, which has also started looking for raw materials from alternative sources since November. Turkey’s largest refinery, STAR, owned by Azerbaijan’s SOCAR, has purchased four shipments of oil from Iraq and Kazakhstan, although it had previously operated almost exclusively on Russian barrels.
Another major Turkish refiner, Tupras, decided to stop refining Russian oil entirely in order to maintain fuel exports to Europe without violating the sanctions regime.
