The United States’ refusal to import Russian oil and petroleum products, as well as its reduction by other buyers, may turn out to be nothing more than a fairy tale both for the electorate and for various “partners” who remain competitors when it comes to profits.
Russia’s oil exports under attack?
It’s not a secret for a long time that Russian producers and traders who sell oil give a significant price discount, which now reaches 30% of the exchange price of the North Sea benchmark Brent. And it cannot but arouse the interest of potential buyers.
Umba storage tanker. Photo: Yandex Images
Some of them buy openly, as Shell did recently, explaining their action by “extreme necessity”, but there are a number of buyers who are not willing to show themselves. More and more evidence suggests that the “shadow” trade in Russian oil is gaining momentum.
Transponders are off – no known buyer?
According to the company Predictive intelligence Windward, the activity of the tanker fleet affiliated with the Russian oil and using the transponder disconnection (equipment enabling to track the location of a vessel) has increased by 600% for the last month. According to RIW, this is not only for crude oil. Similar trends have been seen with other petroleum products, CNN Money reports.
Between 1.2 million and 1.5 million barrels of daily Russian oil exports have begun to “disappear” since February. And since last week, the volume of this mystery oil has reached about 4.5 million barrels a day, research firm Rystad Energy wrote in its report.
Who’s buying Russian oil?
Industry analysts say with one voice that the active buyers of Russian oil under this scheme may be China and India – representatives of the two fastest growing economies and the world’s largest oil consumers. According to Bloomberg’s partial information alone, which is based on ship tracking data, India has bought at least 13 million barrels of Urals oil since the end of February.
Given the above, we can neatly assume that Russian oil exports not only did not suffer, they even increased significantly against the backdrop of high world energy prices.
