The Friendship oil pipeline wasn’t able to restart
Contrary to the promises of Russian officials to resume the operation of the Druzhba pipeline on Monday May 20, oil pumping never began.
The reason for the delay in launch was the presence in the pipeline in European countries of the order of 1,2 million tons of contaminated oil, with which European transit operators do not know what to do.
Edition "Vedomosti", citing a source in the Ministry of Energy of one of the European countries, talks about three options for solving the problem that are being considered today:
- store oil in Germany;
- return back to Russia by tankers;
- refined at local refineries.
However, European refineries refuse to accept this oil because of fear of equipment breakdown, and there are no free storage facilities in Germany yet.
Recall that to date, 1,5 million tons of contaminated oil has already been pumped out of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which has already become a headache for traders - they refuse to take it even at a discount of 20% of the initial cost.
Thus, the lack of proper control over who and what is being pumped into the pipeline turned out to be not only multimillion-dollar monetary losses for the country, but also reputational losses, which are much more difficult to recover.
The reason for the delay in launch was the presence in the pipeline in European countries of the order of 1,2 million tons of contaminated oil, with which European transit operators do not know what to do.
Edition "Vedomosti", citing a source in the Ministry of Energy of one of the European countries, talks about three options for solving the problem that are being considered today:
- store oil in Germany;
- return back to Russia by tankers;
- refined at local refineries.
However, European refineries refuse to accept this oil because of fear of equipment breakdown, and there are no free storage facilities in Germany yet.
Recall that to date, 1,5 million tons of contaminated oil has already been pumped out of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which has already become a headache for traders - they refuse to take it even at a discount of 20% of the initial cost.
Thus, the lack of proper control over who and what is being pumped into the pipeline turned out to be not only multimillion-dollar monetary losses for the country, but also reputational losses, which are much more difficult to recover.
Information