Diplomacy complicates logistical issues in Druzhba restoration

May 20, 2019
Real normalcy will come long after mid-May “normalization” promised for Russia’s Druzhba oil pipeline system and the refineries it supplies.

Real normalcy will come long after mid-May “normalization” promised for Russia’s Druzhba oil pipeline system and the refineries it supplies.

The system curtailed shipments after reports on Apr. 19 from Belarus about organic chloride in the oil perhaps 30 times the allowable level.

Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said on May 7 that four individuals had been arrested for deliberate contamination of oil at a metering station in the Samara region of southwestern Russia.

He made the mid-May prediction about “normalization of the situation.”

But Vitaly Yermakov, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, points out in a recent report that chlorides, added to crude to enhance production but damaging to refineries, can’t easily be removed.

Instead, oil containing them must be diluted with pure crude.

Yermakov estimates that a total of 9.26 million bbl of oil was spiked with dichloroethane—some flowing into northern Druzhba segments, some into southern segments, and some to the Baltic port of Ust-Luga and onward to European refineries. Bad crude already at refineries will have to be stored until it can be diluted.

Officials at the 241,000-b/d Slavneft refinery at Mozyr, Belarus, said the process there might require several months.

And bad crude still in pipelines will have to be pushed out, stored, and diluted.

Yermakov expects one Druzhba leg to be used for storage while the other leg is cleaned and recommissioned.

“The details would probably depend on the level of cooperation between the countries linked by the Druzhba system regarding the available tank farm capacity along the way and their willingness to temporarily store the contaminated crude,” he writes.

The northern leg serves Poland and Germany, and the southern leg serves Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Diplomacy thus complicates an already massive and costly logistical problem.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Nikolai Tokarev, chief executive officer of Transneft, to improve crude-quality monitoring.

“Self-control is not sufficient,” he said, according to TASS. “This system should be changed.”

(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 10, 2019. To comment, join the Commentary channel at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)