Kazakhstan yet to ship 20,000 tonnes of oil via Druzhba pipeline to Germany

ASTANA. Feb 15 (Interfax) - Kazakhstan has yet to ship 20,000 tonnes of oil via the Druzhba pipeline to Germany with commercial negotiations between the supplier and the buyer ongoing, Kazakh Deputy Energy Minister Askhat Khasenov said at a briefing Wednesday.

He said that, as a rule, negotiations on the transportation of the first batch of oil take a long time.

Asked by whether it is true that the transportation of Kazakh oil from Kazakhstan to Germany was temporarily suspended due to shelling of the Druzhba oil pipeline, he replied that the company in charge of transportation had set no restrictions on technical conditions.

Kazakhstan was due to ship a first 20,000 tonnes of oil through the Druzhba pipeline to Germany in the first half of February; previously it had planned to ship the oil by the end January.

As Europe plans to reduce its dependence on Russian oil, the European players turned to Kazakhstan for oil supplies. Russia granted Kazakhstan permission to transport oil through the Druzhba pipeline to Germany. KazTransOil planned to supply 300,000 tonnes of Kazakh oil to Germany in the first quarter of 2023. Akchulakov said earlier that Kazakhstan would export 1.5 million tonnes of oil to Germany in 2023 and might boost exports to 7 million tonnes in the future.

KazMunayGas CEO Magzum Mirzagaliyev has said that Kazakhstan was considering a trial oil shipment to the Schwedt refinery, which had been owned by Rosneft, but in September 2022 Germany's Federal Network Agency took control of a subsidiary of Russia's oil company Rosneft and its shares in three oil refineries. Rosneft Deutschland accounts for about 12% of German refining capacity and is one of the largest fuel market players. The capacity of the Schwedt refinery is 11.6 million tonnes of oil products per year. Starting from the design stage, the plant has historically been linked with the Druzhba oil pipeline and Russian oil fields.