Oil goes a long route

First Deputy Minister of Energy Pavel Sorokin believes that the price of sea transportation of Russian oil will decrease, although now Russian oil “should go to more distant markets, some round trips reach 50-60 days.” Now it takes 61 days for a tanker with Russian oil to complete a round trip from the Baltic or Arctic coast of the Russian Federation to the west coast of India, Alexey Gromov and Alexander Titov from the Institute of Energy and Finance Foundation clarify in an article on the InfoTEK portal. The way to China and back takes about 100 days versus seven days from the ports of the North-West to Northern Europe.

Experts propose to develop offshore transshipment (STS) of oil: an increase in the transport arm increases the efficiency of using larger tankers of the VLCC type. And the restrictions of Russian ports on their acceptance make STS transshipment attractive. It also makes it possible to reduce the transport distance for ice-class tankers and make it difficult to identify the cargo. Alexander Titov explained to Kommersant that until June 2022, STS transshipment of Russian oil was mainly carried out in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Frederikshavn (Denmark), but after the announcement of the sixth package of EU sanctions, they were replaced by Kalamata (Greece), Ceuta (Spain) ) and Yeosu (South Korea). He expects that the absolute volume of STS transshipment is likely to increase, because it becomes profitable to transship oil not only from ice-class vessels, but also from medium tankers to VLCC.

Natalya Skorlygina