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MEOG PIPeLInes & transPort MEOG
Oil tanker analyst: Iran still exporting 700,000 bpd
Iran
DIGItAL tracking agency tankertrackers.com has confirmed Iranian state television reports that the country is selling crude despite an out- right ban by the Us.
Numbers on crude oil exports are hard to attain as Iran continues to avoid official channels of sales. This, in turn, forces analysts and track- ing firms to watch the ebb and flow of tankers leaving Iran’s ports and track their movement.
tankertrackers.com noted that the cur- rent reports by Iran were likely to be true and were not rhetoric by an embattled Rouhani administration.
“Lately, Iran’s two main destinations for its crude oil has been China and syria. In addition to that, refined products bounce via certain trad- ing hubs as they cannot be chemically traced,” samir Madani CEO of tankertrackers.com told Middle East Oil & Gas (MEOG) on December 2.
“Recently, we have also seen a small amount of heavy crude do the same and is most likely to be blended ahead of re-export. All in all, crude plus products are being shipped at a rate of around 700,000 barrels per day,” he added.
Iranian Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri made a statement on December 2 that he and his gov- ernment were continuing to sell oil despite a Us export ban on the product, IRIB reported him as saying.
“Despite America’s pressure ... and its imposed sanctions on our oil exports, we still continue to sell our oil by using other means ... when even friendly countries have stopped pur- chasing our crude fearing America’s penalties,” Jahangiri said. The Us meanwhile has said on several occasions that they had managed to com- pletely stop the export and re-export of oil and petrochemical shipments out of the country.
TurkStream to come into operation in January
turkey
RUssIA’s turkstream gas pipeline to turkey will come online on January 8, the Kremlin has con- firmed, enabling it to divert some supplies that currently flow through Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will open the pipeline with his turkish counterpart tayyip Erdogan in a ceremony in turkey, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters. The pair will also hold talks on other issues including the bilateral relations and the situation in syria, he said.
turkstream runs from Russia for 930km along the bed of the Black sea, terminating in turkey’s western Thrace region. Its first string will supply up to 15.75bn cubic metres of gas per year to turkish consumers, while its second will run further through Bulgaria, serbia and Hungary, delivering an equal volume of gas to customers in Europe.
Russia’s state-owned gas supplier Gazprom broke ground on the project in May 2017, after hiring swiss-based Allseas to lay the pipe, and work on both strings’ offshore sections was com- pleted in November last year. It began filling the pipeline with gas in late October.
turkstream was initially expected to start
operations before the end of this year. Its launch will enable Russia to slash gas supplies it sends to turkey and other European countries via Ukraine. this will strengthen Russia’s hand in ongoing talks on establishing terms for gas transit through Ukraine starting next year, after their current contract expires. The two sides have held several rounds of talks, so far without any progress.
Like elsewhere in Europe, Gazprom is strug- gling with rising competition and flat demand in the turkish market.
Its supplies to the country slumped 34.5% in January to september to 11.6bcm, on the back of a 8% drop in turkish demand to 33.3 bcm and increased imports from Azerbaijan and LNG suppliers.
“The economic turmoil in turkey [has] made consumers there particularly sensitive to the price of gas being supplied, with gas consump- tion pressured by alternative cheap sources such as coal,” Moscow-based VtB Capital wrote in a recent research note. “Gazprom’s gas is probably the most expensive on the turkish market, so to keep its market share the company is inevitably going to have to sacrifice the margin.”
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 48 04•December•2019
