"G7" will look under the ceiling

Sergey Kondratiev, Deputy Head of the Economic Department of the Institute for Energy and Finance, gave a commentary to Kommersant FM on Russian oil prices.

G7 will revise the price ceiling for raw materials from Russia. Countries are going to do this before the end of March, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Elizabeth Rosenberg told RIA Novosti. The current limits are set at $60 per barrel. Western companies are prohibited from transporting and insuring more expensive oil from Russia. Bloomberg, meanwhile, writes that Russian raw materials are becoming more expensive due to an increase in the number of buyers in Asia.

According to the latest Bloomberg publication, Urals shipped from Western ports to China cost about $15 less than Brent. That is even above the price ceiling. But this is not accurate, Sergey Kondratiev says:

“We see that the restructuring for the new realities of the market is going even faster than it happened in 2022. Now they mainly use the fleet of Russian carriers - the shadow one. It is quite possible that the discounts are indeed much smaller. That being said, it's important to understand how Bloomberg's data reflects the bigger picture. Still, we can talk about some one-time shipments or really about general practice. In this case, we returned to the situation of September-October, when discounts for Urals were at the level of $12-18 per barrel.”