Kazakhstan starts transporting oil for export to Germany - KazTransOil

ASTANA. Feb 27 (Interfax) - The KazTransOil has begun the intake of Kazakh oil into the pipeline to export it to Germany, KazTransOil spokesperson Shyngys Ilyasov said on Thursday.

"The intake of Kazakh oil into the KazTransOil main oil pipeline system began on February 23 to transport it to Germany," Ilyasov told Interfax on Thursday.

In accordance with the oil supply schedule approved by the Kazakh Energy Ministry the company will transport 20,000 tonnes of oil via the Druzhba pipeline to the Adamova Zastava oil delivery point in February for further transportation to Germany, he said.

In December 2022, KazTransOil filed a request with Russia's Transneft for transportation of 1.2 million tonnes of oil to Germany in 2023.

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.

Kazakh Energy Minister Bolat Akchulakov said earlier that Kazakhstan would export 1.5 million tonnes of oil to Germany in 2023 and may boost exports to 7 million tonnes in the future.

KazMunayGas CEO Magzum Mirzagaliyev said that Kazakh oil would be supplied to the refinery in the city of Schwedt that had been owned by Rosneft. However, in September 2022, Germany's Federal Network Agency took control of the refinery. Rosneft Deutschland, a subsidiary of Rosneft, holds around a 12% stake in German refining capacity, and it is one of the largest fuel market players in the country. 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.