It was a quiet Easter holiday at the offices of major European oil companies and...
MOSCOW/LONDON - It was a quiet Easter holiday at the offices of major European oil companies and refiners when an email in Russian landed. “What the hell does it say?” one manager recalled thinking as he sent it to his Moscow office for translation.
The disruption sent oil to a six-month high above $75 a barrel, tarnished Russia’s reputation as an exporter at a time of rising competition with U.S. oil sales and triggered a Russian probe into whether the pipeline had been sabotaged. Before the incident, Transneft, which operates 68,000 km of pipelines - enough to go almost twice round the world - was considered very reliable.
Tests by Belarus on oil from Druzhba showed organic chloride levels of 150-330 parts per million between April 19 and 22, according to Gomeltransneft documents seen by Reuters, well above the maximum 10 ppm allowed by Transneft. The oil at the Ust Luga port, for example, could gradually be loaded onto ships mixed with better quality crude but solutions are less obvious for oil still in the pipeline.
“Even though Russia says it has resumed shipments of clean oil, we are still very much in paralysis as the quality is bad,” said a major Western buyer of Russian oil.
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