Russia’s Urals Oil Exports Disrupted By Storm And Maintenance

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

A storm and planned maintenance have forced Russia to suspend on Friday around two-thirds of the shipments of its flagship crude grade Urals from its Baltic and Black Sea ports, Reuters reported, citing traders and vessel tracking data.  

The port of Primorsk on the Baltic Sea will see no shipments of Urals crude in the period December 13 to December 18, according to LSEG data and traders who spoke to Reuters.  

In addition, Urals shipments from Novorossiysk, Russia’s primary port of loading Urals in the Black Sea, were also suspended on Friday because of a storm. 

As of Friday, only one port in Russia, Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, was loading and shipping the Urals blend.

Loadings from Ust-Luga, which loads both Russia’s Urals and Kazakhstan’s KEBCO blend, are scheduled at an average of around 650,000 barrels per day (bpd) for December, per estimates reported by Reuters.  

Overall, all ports in Russia’s western regions, that is, the ports on the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, are planned to load around 1.9 million bpd this month, down by 6% compared to November. 

Russia’s crude oil shipments jumped in the four weeks to December 10, after storms in the Black Sea that had disrupted loadings in November subsided, tanker-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg showed earlier this week.

Russia’s crude oil shipments from all its ports averaged 3.2 million bpd in the four weeks to December 10, up by around 114,000 bpd compared to the four-week average to December 3, according to the data reported by Bloomberg’s Julian Lee.

Meanwhile, Russia’s oil revenues dropped in November to the lowest level since July as crude export prices dropped and volumes declined, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday. 

Russia’s export revenues for crude and oil products fell by 17% month-on-month in November to $15.2 billion—the lowest export revenues for Moscow since July this year, the agency said in its Oil Market Report for December.