Oil transshipment reached a record level

Marcel Salikhov, President of the Institute for Energy and Finance, gave a commentary to Kommersant FM about the export of Russian oil.

According to Bloomberg, five supertankers from Spain are involved in the Urals transshipment. Six more will be activated in the near future. Now this way of circumventing restrictions is the most convenient for exporters, Marcel Salikhov explains:

“Based on tanker tracker data, maritime exports are about 3 million barrels per day. Accordingly, this is about a quarter of all maritime exports of crude oil. The popularity of such operations is increasing. However, the issue of availability of logistics is important, and not just the issue of sanctions. Due to the lack of own large vessels, it is necessary to use such schemes.

How promising is this story? If you mix Russian oil with some other oil in such a way that it ceases to be conditionally ours, then you still need to bring these volumes to some port where there are large storage facilities for raw materials. Taking into account the volumes that Russia exports daily, this is quite problematic.

European ports, of course, are not available, we are talking only about the Middle East, Asia, which is still quite far away. The same reloading ship to ship - this is the Mediterranean Sea - relatively close to Russian ports, respectively, less transport is attracted for reloading. Rather, as logistics issues are resolved, there will be more available tankers. It’s more convenient anyway to carry oil immediately to some ports, rather than reload it at sea.”