Russian oil companies have asked Indian refineries to increase gasoline supplies to Russia after losing about 40 percent of their oil refining capacity due to Ukrainian drone attacks.
Modern.az reports that "Reuters" spread information about this, citing its sources.
According to the information, at least one batch of gasoline has already been sent from India to Russia, and additional supplies are expected after that. However, Russian oil companies want more fuel from India because they have lost a significant part of their processing capacity.
According to the sources, among the companies that applied to both private and state-owned oil refineries in India are “Rosneft” and “Gazprom Neft”.
“Rosneft” lost the Syzran and Saratov oil refineries, which stopped operating after the UAV attacks in July. “Gazprom Neft” stopped the operation of the Moscow oil refinery in June. In addition, the company was forced to stop the operation of the Omsk oil refinery, which is Russia's largest oil refining enterprise and has long remained outside the attacks of Ukrainian UAVs.
Sources said that Indian oil refineries said they did not have additional volumes for export. Nevertheless, Reuters writes that additional gasoline supplies are possible through intermediaries. In this case, the fuel is intended to be unloaded from one tanker to another at sea.
According to sources, Russia may also ask for diesel fuel from India.
According to the information, diesel production in Russia decreased by 40 percent at the height of the harvest campaign. For this reason, the authorities were forced to manually distribute the existing fuel volumes to ensure the supply of products to the stores.
Sources say that domestic diesel production in Russia currently meets demand. However, new Ukrainian attacks could disable a larger part of the oil refining capacity.
According to Reuters sources, it is not possible to restore the operation of oil refining enterprises in a short time. It takes at least two months to restore production, and this is only possible if new attacks do not occur.
According to EA Analytics calculations, the volume of oil refining in Russia fell to its lowest level since 2005 in July, amounting to 3.91 million barrels per day.
This indicator is 27 percent less compared to July of last year, and 30 percent less compared to the same month of 2021 before the war.
“Energy Intelligence” analysts estimate the current oil refining volume in Russia to be even lower – 3.58 million barrels per day. This could be the lowest indicator since at least 2002.
Currently, 3.1 million barrels per day of oil refining capacity is reported to be inactive in Russia.
According to “Energy Intelligence” estimates, the shortage of oil products in Russia reaches 400-600 thousand tons per month. Analysts add that supplies from Belarus and Kazakhstan can cover only half of this deficit.
