Russia restarted the flow of oil through its main oil export pipeline on Thursday after Belarus dropped an oil transit duty imposed last week and agreed to return oil Moscow said it had taken illegally.
”Belarus has fully returned 79 000 tonnes of oil. Transneft started to pump oil in the direction of Belarus at 8.22am Moscow time,” Sergei Grigoryev, vice-president of Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft, said.
”The Druzhba pipeline is working normally.”
Russia, the world’s second biggest oil exporter, had closed the Druzhba (”Friendship”) pipeline, its largest single oil export route, for more than 60 hours, cutting European Union oil supplies by about 1,5-million barrels of oil per day.
The shutdown marked the climax of a trade dispute in which Moscow doubled gas export prices to Belarus at the New Year and imposed a crippling crude-oil export duty equivalent to 10% of the gross domestic product of its western neighbour.
Belarus, once Moscow’s most loyal ally, responded by slapping the oil transit duty of $45 per tonne on Russian oil piped across its territory, effective from January 1.
Transneft said it shut the pipeline when Belarus began siphoning off oil to take payment of the levy in kind, and only agreed to restart the pumps after the missing oil was returned.
Oil firms in Hungary and Poland confirmed that volumes through the pipeline — built in the 1960s to tie communist Eastern Europe to Soviet energy supplies — were back to normal.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, gets about a fifth of its oil imports via Druzhba.
”We would now like to enter into a dialogue with Russia with the goal of putting our energy relations on a reliable, long-term basis,” said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose government has just begun chairing both the European Council and the Group of Eight of industrial states.
Crisis averted
Belarus said it resumed pipeline operations late on Wednesday evening, enabling Russia to turn on the taps and calming fears of a major supply shortage.
”The chance of serious fall-out for Russian oil producers and their European clients now appears remote,” said Steven Dashevsky, energy analyst at Aton brokerage in Moscow.
Dashevsky said no one Russian oil producer was likely to be seriously hit by the stoppage, since the pipeline’s capacity was shared between all the major players.
Belarussian Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky will hold talks with Russian counterpart Mikhail Fradkov on Thursday. Sidorsky said on Wednesday he expected Russia to lift its own trade restrictions on Belarus.
During the dispute, Russia also banned sugar imports from Belarus, which normally sells half its annual production of about 770 000 tonnes to Russia.
‘Parasites’
The dispute alarmed the European energy market in a strong echo of Russia’s gas row with Ukraine exactly a year ago, when a pricing row prompted Russian gas monopoly Gazprom to cut gas supplies on its main European export route.
Gazprom vehemently defended its conduct, saying it never broke any contractual agreements. Russia has blamed this year’s row on Belarus, with Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko saying the oil shutdown constituted force majeure.
Transneft CEO Semyon Vainshtok said the Russian pipeline network had shown its reliability during the Belarus crisis.
”Obviously there were some hotheads who thought that with the biggest oil supply route closed, there would be interruptions to our work,” he said in a statement.
”But during this whole period we did not limit a single oil worker or a single kilogram of oil sent to the pipeline system.”
Analysts expect Russia to seek alternative oil export routes to lessen reliance on Belarus, just as it has begun building a big Baltic Sea gas pipeline to avoid dependency on Ukraine.
”The more Russia’s hands and feet are tied by transit countries, the more they have a temptation to be parasites on Russia,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said before the row with Ukraine. — Reuters