Russia signed a 10-year transit agreement with Ukraine, pledging to load the pipe
Ukrtransneft and the Russian Transneft signed an agreement extending the agreement on the transit of Russian oil through the territory of Ukraine through the Druzhba oil pipeline for another 10 years.
The press service of JSC Ukrtransnafta reported this, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
An additional agreement was signed to the agreement, which guarantees constant volumes of oil pumping, the Ukrainian side claims.
Unlike the gas dispute, the extension of the oil transit agreement did not pose any problem due to the insignificance of the volume of this transit - Russia has long since reduced pumping through Ukraine several times.
Ukrainian energy market expert Dmitry Marunich told PolitNavigator about this.
“The transit of Russian oil through Ukraine is insignificant compared to the total volume of Russian oil exports; Ukraine occupies a small share. About 12-14 million tons of oil per year are pumped through the Ukrainian Druzhba pipeline, which is very little considering the overall huge volumes of exports. This explains the lack of difficulties with signing the agreement.
Moreover, we do not know exactly what is in this agreement. I suspect that it is rather of a framework nature. It is clear that in Eastern European countries there are refineries that find it logistically advantageous to receive oil via this route. That’s why this agreement was extended,” the expert said.
His colleague expert Valentin Zemlyansky noted that oil transit, unlike gas transit, has never been politicized, so its extension was not a problem.
“Oil transit is not critical. It has never been a stumbling block; it is not a key issue. Moreover, the volumes of this transit were decreasing. There is no political conflict here, this issue is not raised on the banner. Accordingly, everything is signed, everything works great. As soon as there is a political conflict, a problem arises with signing agreements,” Zemlyansky said.
The throughput capacity of the Ukrainian oil transportation system is 114 million tons per year at the inlet and 56 million tons at the outlet.
Until 2000, the volume of oil transported by the Ukrainian pipeline system was 65 million tons per year, of which about 53 million tons were supplied in transit for export. Then transit volumes began to decline steadily.
Thus, in 2014, only 17 million tons of oil were pumped through Ukraine, of which 15 million were exported; in 2015, oil transit through Ukraine amounted to about 15 million tons.
Russia signed a 10-year transit agreement with Ukraine, committing to loading the pipeline.