Transneft President Nikolai Tokarev, in an interview with Russia 24 TV channel, said that enterprises in Germany and Poland would continue to buy Russian oil in 2023. VGTRK reports:
“Consumers in Poland and Germany have applied for pipeline deliveries of Russian oil from January 1, 2023, said Nikolai Tokarev, head of Transneft, in an interview with Russia 24 TV channel.
“They announced that they would not take oil from Russia from January 1. And now we have received applications from Polish consumers: give us 3 million tons next year, and 360 thousand tons for December, and Germany has already submitted an application for the first quarter – give it too, ”said the head of the Russian operator of the oil pipeline system.”
The sixth package of EU sanctions provides for the cessation of purchases of Russian oil, but makes an exception for supplies via the Druzhba oil pipeline. At the same time, Germany and Poland announced their decision to abandon pipeline Russian oil.
Susanne Ungard, spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Economy and Climate Protection, told Deutsche Welle that refineries in Germany's eastern lands, which had previously worked on Russian oil and received it through the Druzhba pipeline, would not buy it in the new year. In particular, the PCK Raffinerie plant in Schwedt (Brandenburg) is switching to Kazakh raw materials. Part of the supplies will go through the Druzhba oil pipeline through the territories of Russia, Belarus and Poland, and the refinery has reserved the capacity of the oil pipeline specifically for Kazakh oil.
PCK Raffinerie, like another refinery that worked on Russian oil until 2022, Total Energies Raffinerie Mitteldeutschland in the city of Leuna (Saxony-Anhalt), is negotiating regular purchases of Kazakh raw materials. The proposed route of supplies is as follows: through the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, then along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline to Turkey, from there by tankers to the ports of Rostock (Germany) and Gdansk (Poland), and from there via oil pipelines to factories. But the capacity of the oil pipeline from Rostock to Schwedt is only enough to load the PCK Raffinerie plant by 60–70%, and Druzhba's capacity had to be reserved for the time of debugging deliveries through Gdansk.
Magzum Mirzagaliyev, the head of the Kazakh company KazMunayGas, announced his readiness to deliver a test batch of oil to Germany via the Druzhba pipeline in January 2023; in parallel, some contractual and technical issues must be resolved.
The representative of Transneft, Igor Demin, in an interview with TASS noted that Kazakhstan did not file an official request for transit, and the existing capacity of the Atyrau-Samara pipeline linking Kazakhstan and Russia would not allow to completely replace the entire volume of Russian oil supplied to Germany. However, judging by the statements of the head of KazMunayGas and the press secretary of the German Ministry of Economics, such a request should soon follow, and no one said that Druzhba would completely replace the entire volume of Russian oil: most of the supplies should go by sea.
The Polish oil company Orlen has announced that it will not renew the contract for the supply of Russian oil expiring in January 2023, and the contract concluded until December 2024 will be terminated. According to Orlen spokeswoman Edita Olkovich, the company is ready for a complete cessation of supplies from Russia. Already, 70% of the oil supplied to its refineries in Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic is not of Russian origin, although back in 2015 they were working almost entirely on Russian raw materials. Now Orlen buys oil in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Angola, Norway.