Kazakhstan breaks away from Russia for oil exports
Kazakhstan will divert some of its export oil to an oil pipeline in Azerbaijan, as the Caspian Pipeline Consortium route remains at risk of further suspensions, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Then Kazakhstan will move away from Russia which has recently threatened its oil exports to foreign countries.
In July of this year, a Russian court ordered the suspension of oil flows along the CPC due to an environmental violation: a spill that occurred while loading a Greek-flagged oil tanker last year in the port of Novorossiysk. The company attributed the accident to equipment problems.
The court's decision was overturned by a higher court and flows through the CPC have started, but according to the Reuters report, the Kazakh state sees it as a vulnerability.
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium is the world's largest international oil transportation project involving Russian and Kazakh companies to transport crude oil from Kazakh and Russian fields to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk via a 1,500 km pipeline. Chevron has a 15% stake in the company.
Kazakhstan sends two-thirds of its oil exports through the CPC, which was suspended for a month earlier this year after damage suffered during a storm. Now, the state-owned Kazmunaigaz oil company is in talks with Azerbaijan's SOCAR to redirect some flows through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that ends in Turkey.
Kazakhstan exports around 1.4 million bpd of crude oil, equal to around one percentage point of the global supply. However, according to reports from Reuters, only part of this amount would be redirected to the Azerbaijani pipeline: 1.5 million tons per year, according to one of the sources not cited, equal to about 30,000 bpd.
But this may just be the beginning, according to sources. As of 2023, Kazakhstan could export 3.5 million tonnes of crude oil per year through another Azerbaijani pipeline to the Georgian Black Sea coast. With this, the total flow redirected by the CPC would reach 100,000 bpd, Reuters calculates.
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The article Kazakhstan breaks away from Russia for oil exports comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-kazakistan-si-stacca-dalla-russia-per-lexport-di-petrolio/ on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 06:00:57 +0000.